Chinese (and other) pilots unable to speak English pose danger for air travel (CNN)

wrote:

What is interesting is that in Mexico and parts of South America, the
controllers speak Spanish with local (or domestic) flights, and
english with international flights.
KB.



This matches with what I experienced recently. I was on the ground
aboard a United passenger flight from Brazil to the USA and listening
to the onboard channel 9 ATC to kill time. Except for the United and a
Lufthansa pilot also awaiting clearance to taxi, every other pilot was
talking Portuguese. The controllers spoke perfect ATC English but
switched to Portuguese for the local pilots. I was thinking this could
easily lead to a lack of situational awareness in a large airport like
Sao Paulo's.

Wasn't there a recent ground collision in Sao Paulo?

Robert M. Gary wrote:

Actually in my travels around the world on business I've never found a
country where I couldn't find an English speaker. All you need to do
is find someone under the age of 15. I would guess that 75% of the
world's population under the age of 15 speaks some English (especially
in Asia ,South America, and Europe).

In parts of the US, you wouldn't be able to find 75 percent of the
population under 15 speaking English. If you believe that 75 percent of
the world's population under 15 speak English, you haven't traveled
enough.

Spehro Pefhany writes:

Are you sure he wasn't a Chinese pirate?

There was no reason to believe that he might be a pirate.

JohnT writes:

But you haven't been further than La Défense in the past 2 years except in
Flight Simulator.

I haven't been to Mount Everest, but I know it's a tough mountain to climb.
That's one of the consequences of education.

El Maximo writes:

How about those 1040 instructions printed in Spanish, or did you forget to
file (again)?

The United States is also only a small fraction of the world, and it has an
obsession with political correctness and a substantial minority of Spanish
speakers that most nations do not share.

The odd thing is that most people in the U.S. who can speak only Spanish are
illiterate in both English _and_ Spanish.

Dallas writes:

Tell ya what...

Why don't you make a list of all the foreign countries you've been to and
I'll respond with a list of my own and we'll see who's got the widest world
view.

I spoke of the world; you countered with an observation concerning the city of
Dallas.

NotABushSupporter writes:

In parts of the US, you wouldn't be able to find 75 percent of the
population under 15 speaking English.

Many countries understand the utility of English better than the United States
does.

If you believe that 75 percent of the world's population under 15
speak English, you haven't traveled enough.

I'll agree that this is quite an exaggeration. Most of the world's population
does not speak English. However, English is more widely spoken than any other
language.

C J Campbell writes:

The Chinese are studying English by the millions.

So that would come out to, what, 0.4%?

People can study a language for years without learning it. It depends on
motivation, quality of education, and other factors. In much of the world
people study English for years but never become competent in the language. In
Europe, France has some of the worst English instruction, although all the
Latin countries of Europe are very poor in English.

It is a mistake to think that the things that are done on behalf of an
American cultural minority mean that America is going to change to
Spanish. Even less so for the entire rest of the world. English is
rapidly becoming the universal language of the world. Declare yourself
an English teacher and you can get a job practically anywhere in Asia,
the Middle East, Africa, or even South America.

Quite so. English is now favored simply because so many people already speak
it, and even two people who have different, non-English native languages will
generally choose to communicate in English rather than try to learn each
other's language. Spanish is mostly geographically limited to parts of the
Americas (keeping Brazil in mind), which does not make it useful in most of
the world.

A Guy Called Tyketto writes:

Plus, Anthony, 4 words. Common. Traffic. Advisory. Frequency.

CTAF is not ATC.

C J Campbell writes:

You see that all over Asia. People who supposedly speak the same
dialect who cannot understand each other, so they speak English.
English has become what Esperanto was intended to be.

Chinese is a special case because the spoken versions of Chinese are mutually
incomprehensible; they are completely different. At the same time, the
written versions are generally coherent. So one Chinese person may have no
idea what another Chinese person is saying, but he will immediately understand
if they communicate in writing on a piece of paper.

This is a consequence of the Chinese use of symbols for concepts in the
written language, rather than symbols for sounds. The written language
provides almost no clue to pronunciation, and so pronunciation drifts until
the spoken languages become completely separated.

It's also one reason why Chinese is not likely to ever become a universal
language.