Plane Talk

Communication World, April-May, 1998 by John Freivalds

Some 25 years ago, several international airplane service executives got together and formed what is now called the International Airline Language Council (IALCO), which most of the world's airlines belong to. The mission of the organization is to help airline personnel learn other languages so that they can better communicate with their customers. And since the people who belong to IALCO are human resource and training managers and not airline executives, they also exchange ideas on how to communicate to management which language training program should be funded. Learning languages and better communication with passengers is not a priority of a lot of airline executives.

Yet airlines are the most international of organizations, as they cross countries and linguistic and cultural borders in seconds. The flight attendants must be able to understand their passengers, and vice versa, for both service and safety's sake. The captain needs to be able to communicate with everyone, including control towers around the world as well as the disgruntled passenger in 23B next to the morn with the screaming infant.

Passengers take for granted that all the multilingual communication problems will be solved by the time they buckle their seat belts, but sometimes they are not. Last year, an Indonesian airliner full of Japanese tourists went down. Fatalities occurred because the Indonesian flight attendants could not communicate safety instructions to the passengers. Several years ago, an Avianca Colombia plane went down in New York because the pilot could not convey to the control tower that he was running out of fuel.

But equally disastrous to an airline business are the situations where, for lack of language skills, you cannot communicate with your customers. And international airlines, as business organizations, realize that "more tongues mean more sales." I think anyone would agree that flying British Airways is a pleasurable experience. It is not surprising that it has the leading market share on flights across the Atlantic. North Americans who step on the plane immediately feel that their European experience begins, while Europeans feel at home. Flying to Asia, Singapore Airlines receives the same kudos.

Every day countless tourists to the U.S. are served beef when they wanted chicken, can't explain to an English-only flight attendant that the seat belt is broken, and could they switch seats? Failure to understand these kinds of problems doesn't make the headlines, but in the end can be almost as distressful as a disastrous crash.

Many situations such as these were recounted at the 25th annual meeting of IALCO, which was held last October in Whistler, British Columbia.

While the venues change, the agenda of the meeting is usually the same: What techniques are being used to improve multilingual communication, how are you convincing management that this is important, and which techniques are working the best - whether it be immersion classes or the use of hand-held language calculators - to make yourself known?

The people who belong to IALCO try to put some substance into all the advertising phrases and mottos that the airlines use. You know, "For people who know how to fly," etc. All these phrases do is communicate that the airline has copywriters who usually don't have to deal with passengers.

Striving To Be Number One

The purpose of language learning is to make flight attendants proficient in other languages. This is United Airlines' mission. United wants to be the number-one airline in the world, not just the United States. To do so. United needs to have more multilingual flight attendants. Think about it. When you are flying Swissair, Air France, Lufthansa or Cathay Pacific, the flight crew can always speak English; the captain's announcements are also in English. One of Swissair's ads reads, "Wherever you come from, we speak your language." This is exactly what United is out to achieve, and in all the world's languages.

The airlines at IALCO each had their own unique language problems. Qantas found itself with more Spanish-speaking passengers than ever before, while LAN Chile hired 400 flight attendants last year and now is in the process of teaching them English. Cathay Pacific, based in Hong Kong, had attendants that spoke English and Cantonese. But with the change of status in Hong Kong, a former British territory, Mandarin is now in. Meanwhile, AirBaltic, which flies from Latvia throughout Europe, saw that its 40 flight attendants could only speak Latvian and Russian. Everyone is now busily learning English.

The situation with U.S. airlines is all the more interesting because they are so large - and everyone looks to see what they are doing. United's language programs began because its chairman, Jerry Greenwald, is committed to teaching all employees other languages. A fellow who worked with Greenwald when he was with another U.S. company working in Paris recalls an incident, which had no small role in shaping Greenwald's perceptions about languages. A new manager was appointed to run the office. A week after arriving he declared, "I have been here a week and both French and English are being spoken. I am the boss and beginning next week everybody will use just English." The office became dysfunctional after that announcement.