Priorities, priorities, priorities.

Before last lesson I spent a small amount of time practicing my radio calls for when I head out to the practice area. I practiced what to say when I’m leaving the zone, what to say when I’m making position calls on the common frequency, how to talk to other traffic that may be in your area and what to say to ATC when you want to come back in. Consequently these calls went pretty well. Better than they have before certainly.  So why oh why did I manage to fluff the really easy calls?

The ones that I make to ground every fricken time I fly.  The ones that I should be able to do in my sleep. The ones that I practically got right from day one.  Argghh. It’s the old Homer Simpson principle again. You learn how to do one thing; it pushes another out of your brain. By the time I am able to plan and execute a full-fledged cross country flight, I fully expect to need assistance feeding and dressing myself*

Anyway back to the point. Some people on an internet forum I frequent were carrying out their usual rant about “non-standard radio work”. I tend to switch off from these debates for all manner of reasons, the nearest I can understand is that although there is an internationally accepted “right” way to say things, each country has its own little quirks that it claims are “correct”, sometimes more “correct” than the “international correct”. This confuses people, and rightly so. Occasionally a country will change its accepted phraseology. Sometimes this brings them in line with International standards, sometimes not. An example is the USA, they recently changed their “position and hold” instruction to “line up and wait” which I think** is what the rest of the world use.

Now many of the fine people on these fora have far too much time on their hands for one thing, and for another often have excessively large online personalities, shielded by the fact that the Internet brings a degree of anonymity with it.***. Then you get someone sensible who comes along who realises that there really are bigger things to worry about.The point being, as long as you make yourself understood without confusion you should be ok, it brings up back to the old “aviate, navigate, communicate” priorities. As one poster pointed out, “we do them in that order of priority, we fly, we figure out where the hell we are, and then we speak. Given this order of priorities we are doing well if we get it right on the radio a third of the time so quit Bitchin’!”

I like it!!

 

*RTH may claim I’m at that stage already!

**who knows, I get confused easily and could well have this backwards

*** Pilots with a large ego , surely not !!!