On December 20, 1995, an American Airlines Boeing 757 took off from Miami for Cali, Colombia. The flight was uneventful, but as the crew prepared for descent one of the pilots made a mistake. Intending to orient the flight management computer by the navigational beacon at Alfonso B. Aragon Airport, he locked onto the signal of another nearby beacon transmitting on the same radio frequency, putting the plane off course. “What happened here? It just doesn’t look right,” he said to his copilot moments later. “We got fucked-up here, didn’t we?”
Kent Jones interprets the incident differently. There’s no doubt in his mind that the crash was caused by the language barrier between the flight crew and the air traffic controller, a native Spanish speaker. Crash investigators acknowledge that communication between the cockpit and the control tower was less than perfect: according to testimony given by the NTSB chairman to Congress, the controller lacked “the English language fluency needed to probe the flight crew, from the subtle hints in the inconsistencies of their responses to him, to learn of the extent of their difficulties.” But Jones goes further in characterizing the Cali disaster as part of a larger pattern of destruction resulting from the use of English as the international language of air traffic control. And for the last eight years he’s been fighting a solitary campaign to persuade world aviation authorities to replace English as the lingua franca of the skies with the artificial language of Esperanto. “The beauty of Esperanto,” he says, “is that it has only 16 basic grammar rules and it stays within those rules. English, on the other hand, is just a chaos of irregularity.”
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Since 1995 Jones, a 77-year-old retired civil engineer with a background in aviation, has been writing to the Federal Aviation Authority, the NTSB, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and other relevant institutions, urging them to consider the benefits of adopting Esperanto as the universal language of aviation. Frustrated by the lack of response, in November 2000 he sent a letter to the U.S. General Accounting Office, the investigative body charged with overseeing the government’s use of public funds, to complain that his suggestions were being ignored by the FAA and the NTSB. “This reaction,” he wrote, “appears to violate the U.S. Code, Title 49, which established the FAA [and] requires that safety be the top priority. Not maintenance of the comfortable status quo, not protection of American dominance of the aviation world, just enhancing safety. Pilot-controller language mistakes directly threaten flight safety.”
Jones’s involvement in aviation dates back to 1944, when he served as an air traffic control technician in the navy. “I signed up at the end of the war so I could get more GI credit to go to college. My assignment wound up being in Hawaii at Barber’s Point Naval Air Base. I was maintaining the electronic stuff for a radar unit called GCA, ground control approach, which was a trailer full of electronic gizmos and radios and radars.”
In 1974 Jones began to have trouble moving his legs properly and was subsequently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “By 1978 I was using a cane and by 1982 I was in a wheelchair,” he says.
While Jones’s analyses of individual crashes are subject to dispute, the overall problem of language difficulties in aviation is undeniably real. In a report issued last October, the FAA enumerated 684 “aviation language errors” since 1975 and called for further study of the problem. Even before the report came out, a variety of solutions were being discussed in aviation circles. The Air Line Pilots Association, an American pilots’ union, has long spoken in favor of the official and legally binding adoption of English as the language of the air, followed by the imposition of stricter standards of fluency on pilots and controllers. Other experts have proposed the development of computerized code systems that would provide automatic translation in the cockpit and tower. Jones finds the latter notion interesting but half-baked. “Something like that would need to first be tested on psychological and cognitive grounds,” he says. “It’s a nice dream to think that we can automate our way out of this, but I don’t think that’s practical.”
