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From the Flight Deck
by Kevin R. Dingman
All Through The House
Flying When ‘Twas The Night
You may have noticed that I use a few contractions in my writing. I’d probably use more if I didn’t have a proofreader and editor to save me from myself. Professional writers often consider contractions informal and indicative of “undeveloped” writing skills. Why we still use so many contractions and acronyms in aviation is a mystery: CA, FO, FA, ATIS, NOTAM, FAA, AMEL, ATP, RVSM, METAR and EIEIO. Ok, maybe Old McDonald is the only one that uses EIEIO. In the olden days of aviation, we were trying to save ink (printers), time (FSS teletypes) or thermofax paper (ACARS).
In the age of smartphones, tablets and magic avionics, we could very easily use the full words – especially in our weather reports, automatic terminal information service (ATIS) and notices to air missions (NOTAMS). Whose idea was that “air-mission” thing instead of airman anyway? Since nonapplicable NOTAMs often put us to sleep, cancel- ing “airman” must be to wake us up.
Not like FAA or IRS
A comedian like Jerry Seinfeld might say: “What ever happened to those old contractions?” Twas, for example.
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As in ‘‘Twas the night before Christmas.’ Did its patent get renewed, or did we decide using ‘it was’ is plenty efficient?” Even the MS Word spell checker doesn’t like ‘twas. Per- sonally, I think ‘twas rolls off the tongue quite properly. Not like FAA or IRS. And it’s easier to say than both super- califragilisticexpialidocious and pneumonoultramicroscop- icsilicovolcanokoniosis. The spell checker recognizes both words – one made up by songwriter Robert B. Sherman (for Disney’s Mary Poppins) and the other a lung disease.
But it doesn’t recognize ‘twas. Who’d a thunk?
Well, once upon a time, ‘Twas the night before Christmas and this writer was a junior in seniority airline captain, flying along in his shiny MD-80, and I didn’t have eight tiny reindeer. I used to have a co-pilot and four reindeer working the cabin, but cost-cutting reduced the cabin reindeer to three. And neither Mr. Seinfeld nor Ms. Pop- pins was onboard, and the air was filtered to prevent that pneumonoultramicroscopic-thing. And as usual for a junior pilot, it was evening. Well, it was past evening – it was dark, very dark. By the time midnight rolls around aboard the last flight from O’Hare to LAX, there is indeed not a