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Pilots’ Request for a Toilet Break Turns Into Emergency Alert After Hilarious Misunderstanding With Air Traffic Control (www.paddleyourownkanoo.com)

submitted 4 months ago by Quilotoa@lemmy.ca to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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The plane's toilets weren't working. The air traffic controller understood "pilots" for "toilets." You can read the transcript or listen to the voice recordings.

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To try to attempt to avoid confusion, the international language of air traffic control is regularly conducted in English, but as can be seen in this incident, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people speaking English as a second or even third language might not get confused from time to time.

I think the situation was dire enough here that maybe it's worth trying, as a fallback interchange language, a common ancestor of the Portuguese airline and the French air traffic control

Latin. Maybe that'd clear things up.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Doubt it, the last thing an ATC would expect is a latin word. If the pilots knew the confusion was with the word toilet, they could just spell it tango-oscar-india-lima-echo-tango.

edit: it seems whiskey-charlie is also well known

[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I’m pretty sure the OP was being facetious to suggest Latin.