The pilots of a TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to Nice in the Côte d’Azur got themselves into a very confusing conversation with air traffic control after they tried to ask for an expedited approach for landing when all of the toilets onboard stopped working. The request from the pilots of the Embraer E190…

The plane’s toilets weren’t working. The air traffic controller understood “pilots” for “toilets.” You can read the transcript or listen to the voice recordings.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    101·
    6 days ago

    To try to attempt to avoid confusion, the international language of air traffic control is regularly conducted in English, but as can be seen in this incident, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people speaking English as a second or even third language might not get confused from time to time.

    I think the situation was dire enough here that maybe it’s worth trying, as a fallback interchange language, a common ancestor of the Portuguese airline and the French air traffic control — Latin. Maybe that’d clear things up.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      6 days ago

      Doubt it, the last thing an ATC would expect is a latin word. If the pilots knew the confusion was with the word toilet, they could just spell it tango-oscar-india-lima-echo-tango.

      edit: it seems whiskey-charlie is also well known