Community-youth, Youth

Aviation Jargon – Why Specialised Terminology is Meaningful Without Knowing its Meaning

10 Jan 2024
Text by Francis Chu, NUS Aviation Club

A few months ago, I found myself on a little RJ-900, waiting around on the rainy taxiway of an international airport, just short of a runway. A short delay to allow two flights to depart, we were told. But in the lull between the activation of the intercom and the pilot speaking, there was another voice, the controller, muffled behind layers of static.

Even if I had been able to discern what the controller was saying, it is hard to be confident that I would have understood its meaning. Aviation professionals form a speech community where a highly efficient and standardised form of English is used to facilitate communication across speakers of diverse linguistic backgrounds. Some may call it jargon, but regardless, it is almost a “dialect” of English marked by a formulaic efficiency and demand for clarity. Anyone outside this speech community may find communications laden with jargon puzzling or even incomprehensible.

But interestingly, when this specialised language trickles down to a layman that has never stepped into the flight deck before, it might not be for a strictly informative purpose, but perhaps for phatic – or social – purposes. Think of a pilot who chooses to tell the passengers that the turbulence they are experiencing is merely the plane “flying through an air pocket”. For those fearful of turbulence, this euphemistic change of terminology might just be what they need to calm a racing heart. I was once on a plane that was delayed for half an hour after landing to be “connected to the ground power”. Frankly, I – and I’m guessing most people – don’t have a clue what that entailed or why that resulted in the delay, but its effect was not lost on me as anxious, grumbling passengers settled back into their seats.

I had recently spoken to someone with a mild fear of flying – she mentioned that she did not like flying because too many things were out of her control, and she did not like knowing how many things could go wrong. It made me wonder if this “ignorance is bliss” mindset might be the one at play when pilots give us euphemistically cheerful updates at unnerving instances. Sometimes, when the announcement chime goes off, what the pilot says may be minimally informative, but in fact serves a social purpose of assurance and transparency. Jargon may help with that for those averse to flying, by limiting the amount of information they actually want to know, and reassuring them subconsciously that if the pilot knows big words about the plane, then surely they must know how to fly the plane.

Perhaps phatic purposes can influence the way a professional chooses to express their message in commercial aviation, prioritised even over informative purposes. We might take for granted that straightforward communication would be most favourable, but this can only be the case if humans were fully rational with no consideration for interpersonal relationships. For those outside of the aviation community, jargon could fascinatingly be a more effective social communicator than an informative one.

Photo Credits: NUS Aviation Club