We had left Hong Kong, Durand, a RF/O, and myself, about 5 hours earlier. The day was stellar with amazingly clear skies which allowed us to see far into the Himalayas which were all along the left, southern, side of the aircraft. We were flying on an airway called L888 (pronounced L triple eight).
L 888 was a recently developed and instituted airway over South Central and Western China and was meant to be a more efficient and faster route of passage for commercial traffic overflying China to destinations in either Europe or Eastern Asia. The alternative to L 888 was a serpentine connection of Chinese airways that snaked north into/near Mongolia, then south, then west/east (depending on your direction of travel). It was fuel and time consuming. L888 was mostly straight, but it took you over the northern reaches of the Chinese Himalayas, and over very unpopulated and densely mountainous terrain. If you lost an engine, or had a rapid depressurization while flying the route, or a malfunction that necessitated a fairly rapid descent, “bail out routes” were developed that would take you north and away from the some of the mountains that topped 22,000 feet.
English is the primary language spoken in international aviation. In China, Russia, Brazil, etc, English is not the national language (obviously). The Chinese speak either Mandarin or Cantonese, but when it comes to foreign airlines operating in their country, English is the primary language. However, though English may be the primary language in-flight, it’s not necessarily spoken with much clarity with some controllers; I will admit, if I had to learn a foreign language, like let’s say Mandarin, in order to fly international routes, I’d not be flying international routes.
So it is with great sympathy and admiration that I acknowledge any Air Traffic Controller in a foreign land who must learn English, assuming it’s not their first language.
Normally when flying throughout China, at least when I was flying there in the mid 2000’s, VHF communication was the primary means of talking to ATC. Using VHF meant the Chinese controllers spoke to us verbally, gave direction, in English, using the VHF radio. While I commend most of them for their ability to speak English, since I know, barely, 4 words in Chinese, sometimes there was a communication breakdown and you might have to ask a controller multiple times to repeat an ATC request or directive; I once had a Saudi controller totally stop talking to me because I asked him to repeat a clearance 3 times. Now it must be said that in many countries of the world controllers will speak to pilots in their native language, not necessarily English, and it can be a bit confusing when you hear the controller talking to you in English and then someone else in the national language; For example, the French Controllers will speak to French pilots in French and not English, thusly you are hearing two different languages being spoken to different crews.
A wonderful invention that came along in the 2000s was CPDLC (Controller Pilot Data Link Communications). Essentially it is a way for the controller and the pilot to “text” each other; in English of course, since again, English is the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) language. While it may seem hard for the controller to have to learn both the written and verbal form of English, I can say with much certainty that from the pilot point of view, using the written/typed English texts, via CPDLC, is infinitely easier and generally much more efficient way of controlling an aircraft; you take out a fair bit of guessing as to what the controller might have said. Telling an aircraft via a CPDLC text to “Climb and maintain flight level 350” is a much less ambiguous communication, in many cases, then having a foreign controller tell you the same in an audible message; sometimes the accent of the controller in a foreign nation can be very hard to understand, especially if the ATC instruction involves a route change. I must note however, that CPDLC is not used in most ATC communications. It’s normally used over the more remote areas of the world, such as when flying over the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, the far Canadian North Country, or anywhere where VHF equipment is hard to maintain and service.
L 888 was designed, due to the remoteness of it, to use CPDLC. Given this remoteness, VHF communication would be sporadic so CPDLC, which can use the SATCOM ability of the operating aircraft, is able to transmit and receive messages over very remote parts of the world using orbiting satellites which send/receive and route messages to the appropriate controlling agency.
A typical CPDLC message you might receive when flying on L888, particularly as you neared the western end of it, would be “CONTACT URUMQI CONTROL ON 125.8 AT 1200Z.” Ok. Pretty easy to understand, right? The ship’s clock was always displaying Zulu time, so at 1200 Zulu you called Urumqi on 125.8 on the one of the aircraft’s VHF radio’s (normally the left VHF). Throughout the areas of the world where I’d used CPDLC to communicate with ATC I always found the ATC messages unambiguous and easy to understand. Always….
So, it was with great shock, on this late March, 2006, while flying over Western Communist China, at some altitude measured in meters, though near 36,000 feet, Durand I received a CPDLC message that read: “HAVE YOU SEEN THE MOVIE BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN WE DID AND WE LIKED IT”
As per my company’s directives at that time, each pilot, Captain and F/O, were to read, silently, the CPDLC message and then discuss what they felt the message conveyed. 99 percent of the time the message was clear, easy to understand, and unambiguous…not this one.
After we each read the message, me maybe ten times, I looked at Durand and he then said to me (BTW, this was his first trip operating over China, in his life, and also his first time using CPDLC), “So does this happen a lot?”
I was stunned. I mean really? All I could think of was that some ATC Controllers in the far western, barren, reaches of China were bored and probably got a laugh over sending that message to a crew from America (You have to know what the movie was about to understand the implications of it’s meaning, or not, in being sent).
After a long pause I looked at Durand and said, snarkily, “Since you are getting trained on an aircraft that flies around the world and you will be going to those exotic, and maybe not so exotic, destinations, your training priority now is to formulate and send a message that neither insults ATC and the the host nation, nor which get’s us in hot water, but one that also sends a message of our own. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yeah, I can do that,” said Durand with a wry smile.
After a few minutes of contemplation, Durand typed out his proposed reply to ATC: “WE HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE OUR WIVES DID NOT WANT TO GO WE HEARD IT WAS GOOD.”
After reading it I laughed out loud as I thought it was a very tactful and diplomatic response.
“Nice response dude,” I said. “I could not’ve have done better myself. Send it.”
After waiting with bated breath for a few minutes, ATC sent us a message, via CPDLC, that directed us to contact Urumqi Control on a certain VHF frequency.
Since Durand was flying and I was working the radios, I made the appropriate check-in to Urumqi on the left VHF radio (we have 3 in the aircraft); in about an hour or so Urumqi would hand us off to Almaty Control, an ATC agency of Kazakstan, and we’d be leaving China behind.
“Durand?” I said after a few moments pondering that “Brokeback Mountain” CPDLC message and after having checked-in with Urumqi Control and reported our altitude and estimate for our next reporting point.
“Durand?, I was thinking, ya know, if we lose an engine out here and have to divert somewhere, I am making a decision now, that, we should we have to divert, we will not go into Urumqi (pronounced “your RUMP key”)…ok? I don’t care if we are overhead of it, we will go to Almaty, Astana, anywhere, but we’re not going to “YOUR RUMP key.”
“You’re the boss,” he said.
COPYRIGHT NOVEMBER, 2021 Roger Blair Johnson
Loved the story very funny