Unnecessary verbiage or sensible redundancy?

"Peter Duniho" wrote in message
...

When I'm confronted with a single-digit runway, I usually speak both
numbers
on the radio. However, I'm sure there have been times when I simply said
one number.

The solution to the "missed number" problem is not to add numbers. After
all, unless you know everyone is doing it (and you never can), you can't
rely on that rule to fill in missing information. For example, generally
going around saying both numbers would not have done a single thing to
help
you fill in the blanks in that Cherokee's transmission. You still would
have been left wondering if he was talking about 02 or 20.

Not really. He'd have said "Cherokee blah-blah downwind zero", which
fails the consistency check. I probably think he meant 02, but I'd
be sure to ask for a retransmission. Of course, you can postulate bizarre
intermittent transmission problems which fail the test, but I'd wager that
*mostly* one gets a single contiguous transmission, interrupted by being
stepped on perhaps, or as in this case by the simple mistake of the dancing
finger.


The real solution to chopping off transmissions is for pilots to not chop
off their transmissions. One technique that would help a little would be
to
include the airport name at both the beginning and ending of the
transmission, but that still leaves the opportunity for a pilot to chop of
the name of the airport.

And in busy airports, when one can hardly get a word in? Dropping
the airport name at the end would seem to enhance safety & lots
of people tend to do it.

The real solution is for pilots to only speak when
the PTT switch is being held down, and to put a brief pause at the
beginning
of the transmission (just a half second or so is perfectly sufficient).

They could still be stepped on, if not by other pilots then by an ASOS.