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.
I’m shocked some people are saying she didn’t communicate it clearly.
- ATC repeatedly tried to guess things and made the situation worse instead of asking for an explanation or to spell the word/problem. “Are you declaring an emergency?”, “is your autopilot inoperative?”, “do you have a medical problem?”, “we suspect the aircraft has no pilot”.
- “pilots are inoperative” is not how anyone would say it
- who wouldn’t declare an emergency in that case?
- what non-pilot would be so calm if they were flying the plane?
She even explains why a toilet is used (so passengers can relieve themselves).
It seems to me that the first controller planted the idea that she said they had no pilots, and everyone else just took that as a fact.
The FAA is terribly underfunded and understaffed
This was in Europe tho
This is some of the worst ATC I have ever seen. Not sure how these pilots could have been clearer about the situation.
Heavy Portugese accent vs heavy French accent. I’d have difficulty understanding either one!
https://pilotinstitute.com/acars-explained/
Modern aircraft have a system called ACARS that sends text messages to ground systems.
Text-based communication reduces the risk of misheard calls, especially if the frequency is jam-packed.
Might have been a good option in this case.
fatfingers the text to the tower
Yeah, but at least then you know that you’ve done that, because it’ll display it on your screen.
I thought maybe the pilot had an upset stomach and had warned others near the lavatory, “You all need to get out of here because I’m fixin’ to blow it up.”
“The pilot is dying in that bathroom, I can hear him fighting for his life”
In another post today “TIL the word toilet”.
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.
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
I’m pretty sure the OP was being facetious to suggest Latin.
