Thank you Mr. Bertorelli for your article. It highlights an awkwardness/uneasiness/reluctance by US pilots that I’ve found interesting.
I was trained in the US, flew for a US Airline, all the while believing that you just don’t declare an emergency unless you absolutely must. I don’t ever remember being specifically told that but it was very ingrained into my psyche.
Then I went to work with a foreign airline. Several of the American pilots in my group and I were nearly mocked by the instructors about our Mayday insecurities. We were told to basically ALWAYS declare a Mayday and work out the details later.
We also had one other helpful tools drilled into our heads that I found almost as useful as a mayday call; that was the pan-pan call. I’m not talking about a cheap pizza deal but the call used to convey distress (Pan-pan) but not urgency (Mayday). I used it several times to great success. If we had something unusual crop up but did not need priority handling, we called “pan-pan”. However, if the situation escalated, ATC would not be surprised and was ready to give us priority immediately upon the use of “Mayday.”
As far as I know, “pan-pan” is still in the AIM (6.3.1). https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html/chap6_section_3.html
Any ideas as to why this isn’t in the lexicon of US pilots? Our Air Traffic Controllers in the US are outstanding but would many even know what I meant if I keyed the mic and began with, “pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan…”?