There’s an amusing quip from award‑winning
author Robert McCloskey that says, “I know that
you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize
that what you heard is not what I meant.” This double speak serves to
illustrate the importance of clear communication. There are few places in human
endeavors where that’s as critical as in pilot‑ATC communications.
This is an article that should be required once-a-year reading for every IFR capable pilot especially, for example, commuter types. No stones thrown there!!
The point is those folks that fly repetitive routes daily tend to get “casual” about things like clearances especially on the myriad good weather days. Fly a three or four day trip cycle and never see a cloud, well readback of clearances doesn’t seem as important. Been there myself as a commuter type. You leave JFK enough times a day and you tend not to listen that close sometimes to the clearance. Do the Canarsie enough times in a row, you don’t hear the controller say Bridge.
Even those of us that do automatically readback sometimes fall into the trap of using shorthand when it isn’t proper to do so. Example: departing a foreign airport in our 747, the clearance was: “XX1234, behind the landing Airbus, cleared to backtaxi on rwy27 into position and wait.” The NFP read back: Roger, XX1234 behind the landing on to hold" . This started a 2 minute fiasco on the tower freq for all the listening world to hear. The controller immediately panicked, told us to HOLD POSITION then read the clearance again. This went on twice until I told the NFP to either readback the clearance exactly or get out of the seat for the third pilot to sit down. The kid didn’t like it but he finally read back the clearance exactly and we went on about our business.
Let’s review the bidding on that little tale:
Foreign airport where English, especially US English is not the primary language.
I was very experienced at that airport and didn’t remember hearing that voice before so likely a new or fairly new controller.
-Controller expected to hear back exactly what he said and didn’t have the linguistic experience to translate the jibberish he heard into the equivalent of the clearance he gave.
-Because he was unsure what was said, the controller couldn’t determine if we would wait for the landing aircraft to pass or not.
NFP likely wanted to “sound cool” or “like the old Pro” but only ended up making a fool of himself.
Proper readback of clearances serves all the previously noted safety purposes. Always reading them back and doing so in the same order as given and to the best of our ability with the same words is a very healthy step towards air safety. When / if your flying career involves overseas flight, careful properly enunciated readbacks will also save you occasional grief on the radio.
When it comes to reading back an approach clearance, vis-à-vis a VTF(the examples given), I see nothing
wrong with just reading back the numbers, i.e. ‘one eight zero, two thousand, cleared approach’. This strikes
me as being unambiguous probably 95% of the time since these clearance are very standardized. Repeating
verbatim strikes me as being a waste of a controller’s valuable band width.
F. Loeffler, CFII