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and call on 121.5. The call should contain the name of the station addressed, your call-sign, the nature of the emergency, fuel (in minutes), the number of SOB’s (souls on board), your intentions and your request. Since the radio call is supposed to begin with “mayday, mayday, mayday,” in order to combat our difficulty in the transition to using mayday instead of emergency, perhaps we could squeeze in the word “emergency,” and transmit something like this: “Mayday, mayday, mayday. Albuquerque Center, Cirrus 117 Charlie Romeo; we have a medical emergency. One hundred sixty minutes of fuel on board and four SOB’s. We need to land immediately at Taos. Request radar vectors for the RNAV 13 and ARFF after landing.”
By using the attention-getting and traffic-stopping word “mayday” like the ICAO folks want, but then adding our Yankee emergency declaration, perhaps we can quiet the Hollywood, no-warm- beer-cowboy within us and still receive the priority and assistance we need. But don’t mention the beer or pink ra- zor thing – I was only kidding and the
controller may not have my sense of humor. In any case, this phraseology has evolved over time to provide clarity and brevity in communications and to ensure that phrases are unambiguous. Don’t freeze up over the verbiage though, use plain language and any format that you want if necessary – remember the exceptions and authority granted over the piece’s parts and subparts of the FAR’s in an emergency.
Wings Fall Off
One of my favorite Far Side cartoons by Gary Larson goes something like this: The picture shows a doofus-like guy sit- ting in a passenger seat on an airliner with multiple controls on the armrest. One control is a two-position switch la- beled “Wings stay on” and “Wings fall off.” The caption reads: “Fumbling for his recline button, Ted unwittingly instigates a disaster.” The humorous inference, of course, is that Ted jettisoned the wings. An engine fire or failure, in the weather or at night, has historically been the direst of inflight emergencies that we face. But engine failures, while rare, that are han- dled with a nominal amount of training
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June 2019 / TWIN & TURBINE • 29