Read you 5 – Handshakes, Courtesy and Brevity

In my previous article Is this on? I gave a short intro about what this blog series will be about, so let’s not waste any time and start with a delicious topic: shakes!

Got you interested there, didn’t I?

Much to my regret, this article will not be about milkshakes or other delicious blended drinks, but about handshakes and their primary use in our Western cultural environments: They are part of a proper introduction. There is only one little issue we have sitting in our little aircraft, happily flying above the clouds VFR and wanting to enter into a conversation with air traffic control or flight information services: We can’t simply stretch out our hand, shake hands and say: “Hey! It’s me, great to meet you!“. So while we cannot reach out and shake hands, we will have to substitute this with some sort of virtual handshake to get acquainted with the controller and start our conversation.

Yelling at our counterpart will not work, as most likely he will be several miles away in a cozy building with other fellow controllers, looking at radar screens and trying to see what you are doing there, as you have not yet made any contact. But aircraft are equipped with radio equipment, so this will be our primary tool to get the controller’s attention.

We have tuned in the frequency for the ATC or FIS we want to reach and need to establish two-way-communication. Let me start off with an example of how a really improper initial call looks like:

What the pilot has done here is the equivalent of storming into an apartment full of people, looking for the host and then barraging him with your life-story without having been asked to share it. This would probably sound like this:

If you were the host, you would probably get as far as Frank being a flight engineer and having arrived by bus, but the rest would have been drowned in the flood of information provided. Controllers are humans, too, so without being prepared for this flood of information, the controller would reach his attention limit pretty soon on such an initial call and would have to ask again. Remember that we want to limit frequency time and make things as brief and precise as possible.

This is probably the reason why every AIP, AIM or other aviation document has a short introduction on how to establish radio contact and which format to follow. Your mileage in different countries may vary, however let’s use Germany’s AIP as a reference to conduct a proper aviation handshake:

Now that we have properly shaken hands and introduced each other, we can start with the rest of the call to get further acquainted. Well, the controller will not really provide more information about him, but he still wants to know who we are and what we have planned:

We are done! We have done a proper handshake with the controller, he knows who we are, where we are and what our intentions are. From here on, we can expect traffic information about known traffic and information about active restricted areas, parachute jumper drop activity and useful information for our journey to Wilhelmshaven. We mentioned earlier that pilots and controllers have this urge to keep transmissions brief and precise? There is an excellent opportunity here for pilots to combine the initial call with a radio check and save valuable seconds of frequency time. If you are calling in on an AFIS or ATC frequency on the ground before having started the flight, you can check your equipment while shaking hands:

We are done for today, we have properly introduced ourselves and are starting to get used to each other. Thanks for reading so far and see you next time, when we take a look at phraseology and voice communications.

1: I guess you had already wondered why the series are called Read you 5? The ICAO folks will use a different way to express readability over radio than loud and clear or the also common read you 5 by 5. The ICAO folks will use the values 1 (unreadable) to 5 (perfectly readable) to evaluate readability, thus hopefully making this blog: 5 – perfectly readable.