Translator: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Denise RQ
Crossing borders is what I'll be talking with you about this afternoon.
And that will take the rest of the evening
because I have a very long life although it seems short.
But I'm happy to tell you,
that I have led the most incredible, the most interesting life.
I grew up in Finland, so I'm Finnish by birth.
I speak Finnish, I know some German, French,
a little bit Japanese, a little bit Swedish, etc.
The point is that I have grown up with languages and issues
and I have to deal with languages all of my life.
I lived in the US, I lived in Japan a couple different times.
So my whole life has been a story
of crossing borders, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, political ones, etc.
But today, I am not here to tell you what an incredible life I've had,
and tell you the all different stories that I could about it.
But I will share one time and one episode within my life
that concerns all of us who are here today.
It may sound remotely removed from me,
and I'll give you just my foreign language.
(Finnish) (Japanese) Although I can talk in any language,
(English) let's continue with English nonetheless.
So the big event that I wish to talk you about
is something that happened actually about 10 years ago.
So it's a ten year anniversary of a very significant event in the world
that the general public for the most part knows very little if anything about.
And that event is that ICAO,
the International Civil Aviation Organization,
which is an UN arm, decided after a five year-long study
to say that English is and must be the language of global aviation.
Did you know that English was not the language of global aviation
until 10 years ago?
That's really a pretty scary thing to think about.
English has been spoken in the skies in terms of aviation phraseology,
pilots and air traffic controllers used it and I'll tell you more about that later,
but what I'd like you to keep in mind right now is
that from 2003, there has been a mandate within the global aviation
that concerns all pilots and all air traffic controllers
that cross again, linguistic or national boundaries,
who happen to come in contact with crews
from other countries and another nations,
they need to be able to fall back on a common language,
and that is English.
So English is the language of aviation and everyone involved must know it.
Communication, in general, is very dependent on the fact
weather we understand one another's messages or not.
Communication is you telling me something,
me trying to process what you've said and saying it back.
Many of you know from home
talking to your spouses or to children that we very often say:
"What do you mean, what do you mean?"
We speak the same language, and we live in the same family.
And yet we don't understand one another.
Here we are talking about a situation in a context
that [implies] safety, and [is] cautious, crucial
because we are flying planes
or taxiing on the ground where there's other traffic.
We must be successful with communication.
The communication success, here in aviation, depends
on understanding the jargon, understanding the professional language
that pilots and controllers use among themselves.
We call that a jargon,
and that phraseology that I will talk to you about just momentarily.
And our understanding depends on understanding
standard procedures for standard situations.
We hope that everything remains standard.
However, life is often not standard.
All sorts of things happen out of the blue.
Things we don't expect.
And if you think about your day today,
it may not have been standard in every way you'd have liked it to.
Something didn't work: you had a run in your stocking;
you had the wrong thing for breakfast;
you got the phone call at the wrong time, you were late.
Life happens, it happens all the time.
In aviation it is scary when life happens.
And yet, people are operating large machinery,
therefore it is extremely important
that people involved in this are focused.
So why do I say 'we'?
Because life happened to me in 1996, I married a flight school owner.
And the flight school was located in Southern California.
I became involved with pilots, air traffic controllers,
air craft of all kinds, airplanes, helicopters,
it was a brand new world to me.
I crossed into a world I didn't understand at all.
But what I did understand was
it was very interesting, and it was very cool.
And it was so fun to go up on the [rights] when I could just sit there and say:
"This is a lot of fun, I don't have to do anything
except try to look nice and wave and hope our neighbors can see me,"
although you are often too high and you can't wave to anybody.
But anyway, so here I am at Maximum Integrity Air,
getting very interested in aviation all in all because it's all around me.
And there were many international students at our school, and that's a good thing.
It's excellent to have this exchange between countries and so forth.
But what was really curious and what began to bother me
was that when I would talk to these international students
and go and introduce myself and say:
"Hello, my name is Marjo, how are you doing?"
And the answer would be:
"I'm fine, thank you, my name is so and so."
And then I turned back and say:
"Well maybe, could you tell me
why are you interested in becoming a pilot?"
(Laughter)
"Excuse me?"
And the person would run away.
I thought surely I don't have that effect on everybody.
But it turns out it was the language.
It was a language issue.
This person could not understand what I was saying
beyond "Hello', "How are you?", "I'm fine, and you?"
sort of a junior high school level language lesson.
So because I am concerned,
I go into the Federal Aviation Regulations
to see what do the regulations really say about
English ability within this context.
And the FAR within the United States read
just what it says on the screen:
pilots must be able to read, write, speak, and understand English.
I'm go, yes, there is the point, case closed.
This is done.
People have to know English.
But if you think of these four skills, they are all very different.
Writing, reading, speaking, listening are all very different skills.
And of all these four, let's take a quick vote here:
how important do you think is reading?
If you think it's very important, yell loudly "Yes!"
Marjo Mitsutomi: Reading? (Audience) Yes!
MM: Writing? (Audience) Yes!
MM: Speaking? (Audience) Yes!
Oh, you are smart. (Laughter)
MM: Understanding? (Audience) Yes!
Yes! these last two things, speaking and understanding,
are the most crucial things one has to be able to do
when you are having a communication within a cockpit.
Then the next question is, and here I am, I'm an applied linguist by training,
besides all the other languages I've learned,
my professional training is
in language teaching second language acquisition.
This is what I know how to do!
I know how to assess people.
I know what language standards are.
I wanted to read further in the regulations.
What does it mean to have to be able to speak and understand English?
Speak to what level?
Speak to whom?
Speak in which context?
Does one need to be able to recite Shakespeare?
Or does one need to be able to give a college presentation in English?
And the answer is, "No."
You have to be able to understand what's going on at any given time
when someone is speaking to you within the context of flying, right?
And the same thing is true with the test; I wanted to know,
"How does, in this case, the FAA know
if a person has mastered English?"
But there is no way, except when you go to take a medical exam
at the medical licenser's office
to find out that you are healthy enough to fly.
So they take all routine tests, listen to your heart, this, that and the other.
And the doctor has a form in his hand which he is filling out.
He is checking a box on the bottom of this form that says
"Can speak and understand English."
At the doctors' office, how is that related to flying?
How good are you going to be with your English
when your pants are down and you are nervous anyway?
Do I know English?
I don't know anything if that's my case.
That's not a good place to check if one's English is good enough.
Or if you are flying and your instructors are talking to you.
When I decided to take lessons,
I came to the conclusion that when my instructor was speaking to me
I needed to be able to just wait and sit still,
and have him have the controls and say, "Just talk to me."
I can't do this and listen and learn everything at the same time.
It was a lot of work.
So when I finally understood there is a real issue here,
and again, I'm speaking from the pilot's perspective,
pilots are supposed to know how to speak and understand English,
but nobody knows to what degree, what ability, what proficiency level.
And nobody knows how to test it.
And so my thought was:
we've done this in my profession for decades, for a very long time.
Why don't we bring these together?
Why don't we bring people from language teaching and learning
and the aviation folks together to talk about this?
Because it's surely a big issue,
and seems to concern everybody safety in global aviation as far as I'm concerned.
Especially when these planes were flying over my own house.
It seems like an important thing.
But the thing is how does one change international law?
How do you do that?
I don't know how to do that.
So I'm in Southern California
at a non-towered airport trying to figure out
how to go about this humongous issue?
I had no idea, except to say, "Please, God, this is way bigger than me!"
And I am going backwards.
Let's go forward, here we are.
And I did decide that the only thing I could do was to keep learning.
I learned about the issue more,
and talked to anybody and everybody who knew, who understood,
went to the places where this was been discussed,
and tried to start spreading awareness.
That's where I started flight training.
I understood that as a linguist I could go to many different aviation events,
and the retired military type were not going to listen to some blonde
talk about what they are supposed to do in the cockpit if she doesn't even fly.
So I decided I had to learn how to fly.
And that was the most exciting and the most awful and scary thing
I've ever done in my entire life.
But I did it, I did earn a license.
And I do know that you have to be able to use ATC phraseology.
And that's a memorized set of phrases
that pilots and controllers use between themselves.
It's concise to the point there is no extra "Hello", "How's it going?",
"What's happening in your life?", no chitchat.
It's all about what's happening. It's very quick ad short.
But it takes a while to learn that.
And so, regardless of your language background,
all of us have to memorize this phraseology.
And in my case I remember a particular time,
I'm flying around our airport for the first time by myself.
And my instructor, whose name is Morton,
is down on the ground with a hand-held radio.
And I'm up in the sky coming in for a landing at our airport.
And the baby pilot I am,
I see I am way too high I see the runway way over there!
And I know that I'm not at the right altitude
I need to do something in order to come down lower to make my landing.
But I don't know how to operate the plane well enough at that point.
So I am completely confused
and can't remember anything about phraseology.
I barely manage the plane and so I thought,
"OK, what am I going to do? " I need to let my instructor know that I am OK.
But I also need to tell him I'm not ready to come in for a landing.
So I clicked on the radio,
and everybody on the same radio wave can hear me.
So I'm going, "Morton!" - that's his name - "Morton!"
"Cessna 3 9-0-3 9-0-3, yes?"
"Morton, I'll be right back."
And I turned the plane around and went into a big 360,
one of these and finally come back at the right altitude
but was embarrassing
because some of the other people had heard me and go, "Ha-ha.
You did come right back, didn't you?" "Yeah, ha-ha."
Other times, something similar happened when I flew to Las Vegas.
And the air traffic controller says to me--
I'm on the controls, and I hear something like,
Cessna 3 9-0-3 9-0-3, do you see jet stream?"
And I'm thinking of this white stuff that planes leave behind them in the sky.
I'm looking for jet stream, and I key my radio and I say,
"Negative, no jet stream".
And my instructor gets right back on and says,
"Affirmative, in sight"
And they were talking about Jetstream, airplane.
It's a...
This is what happens if you are not communicatively competent.
And this is what the aviation lies about
that you need to be able to think on your feet and explain your situation.
But it is an airplane called Jetstream, and I didn't know that.
But through practicing, through talking, through finding out
who is interested in the issue, the same issue that I am in,
I met a woman within the FAA, a Safety Program Manager
who was also concerned about communication issues.
She took me under her wing and would take me
to the every possible safety event that happened in the United States.
And interesting enough, in 2000,
we won an award from the US Government for our initiative in safety,
which is not why I got into this.
No money, no fame,
it was just hard work; but I felt compelled to do something.
And the result of that: the FAA sent me to ICAO,
the group I talked to you about earlier, the UN arm,
to be part of a group - that was called the PRICE Group -
multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual, international,
was all-stakeholders involved, and the common goal was
to create a standard for pilots and controllers in aviation.
And this is the model that we came up with.
And that is that yes,
the air traffic control phraseology is absolutely important.
It's a must at all times.
That what we should use to keep things simple.
But when something happens?
When life interferes? When you don't know what to say?
Or something unusual is going on?
Then you need to be able to fall back down
on the safety net of this plane language.
And the exciting thing was, as I said at the beginning,
a 198 nations, in 2003,
signed this mandate into a law and said, "Yes, we believe in this.
We don't care about the national pride.
We don't care that it's not our language that we are not using.
English happens to be the lingua franca of the world today,
whether we like it or not, it just is.
And it was already used for ATC phraseology.
And the operation level means
pilots and controllers are safe to operate planes
when they speak and understand at the operational level.
And the proudest thing for me about this standard
is that it was written for both native speakers and non-native speakers.
It's not OK for native speakers in the London accent,
or in the Cockney accent, or in the Alabama accent
to confuse foreign pilots who don't understand what they are saying.
So they too need to come to the same standard
because everyone cares about everyone else in this community.
And we try to make communication doable.
So crossing borders, whichever way it is, is hard work
and safety is absolutely the key.
But my question to you today is,
"What are the borders that you might need to cross?"
"What is the calling on your life?"
For me, Aviation English came at a junction where my background
and the problem that I became aware of intermingled and met somehow.
And I felt I had to do something; didn't know how, but it happened.
And 10 years later, this lies still in place.
So what's your calling? What is the big question?
What is that's eating at you, gnawing at you?
Because that is what you need to pursue.
And you can do it.
Because nothing is impossible when we were in it together.