>to get their tense right on each [French] word.
Only verbs have tense!

So there are no costs incurred teaching the pilots any other languages?

We’ve got to pick one language, and you know we’d be spending a hell of a lot more if pilots required training in several languages or even a different one.

Let’s take a look at how difficult languages are, as well. Chinese, as well as several major languages are tonal. Rising, high, low and falling tones of basically the same sound can all create a different word. Training in this would be awefully hard for most anyone else in the world that isn’t 100% based on tones (we still have it in English, but it isn’t required to be understood, such as when we ask a question with a rising tone on the last word). Another note – over a headset, these tones can be difficult to pick up on, requiring extra listening training.

The written system of chinese (or mandarin, whatever you will pick there) is very difficult. No two characters are alike and by the time you graduate high school you should know how to write 10,000 different words.

Besides English, I only know a few other languages that might be suitable for pilotng besides English. Spanish or Japanese may work, due to their simplicity and use of past/present/future tense structures. I wouldn’t know about any european languages though. Perhaps some one could fill me in. I know French probably wouldn’t work, as I hear even French people walk around with dictionaries in their back pocket to get their tense right on each word.

we just want the truth. we know asians, east asians, in general, do Not high Verbal skills.

high math skills.
low verbal skills

cannot speak English, known fact of the world. known fact to the world.

Now of course there were Anglo-centric policies that swayed this, but it’s for one very simple reason – English speaking countries (US/UK) are, and have been for 200 years, the dominant countries on the planet.

We tend to think of the world in quiet and peaceful terms when discussing “rights” and “should bes” – but that’s simply not now things work, or at least didn’t in the past (and I would argue still largely don’t).

So what’s “fair” and what’s “true” are not the same. Good on the people looking to change this, and all the power to them – however, fair or not, the truth is that English is the most widely spoken language in the world and so when a single language needs to be chosen for consistency and safety (such as air traffic control), it only makes sense that the most spoken language be chosen.

As the great Gord Downie once said “Anything that’s systematic will get you hated…”

Even if my brother did not have a good time on Air China, this situation would still be worth mocking.

These people are not in the restaurant business, where bad english might result in a chicken sandwich instead of beef.

These people drive big airplanes full of people, where if you cannot speak english to Air Traffic controllers, the result might be a lot of dead people.

And as I said, that is disgraceful.

Don’t you think that Chinese people deserve better than that?