ABSTRACT
Since the dawn of time, communication has been an integral part of human life and the need for better technology to support our communication has been growing continuously.
In 1951, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) instated English as the official language of aviation. ICAO advised all airports and routes to operate in their native language, but to use English for international flights. ICAO Document 9835 that came out in 2004 is a Manual on the Implementation of Language Proficiency Requirements for the airmen. Although pilots and air traffic controllers must use standard phraseology to communicate. Over 800 people lost their lives in three major accidents. A common contributing element: miscommunication. In this chapter, we study some catastrophic consequences of miscommunication in aviation. Bad communication would not be expected to produce good results. But there are also hidden layers in the human interaction that make communication difficult. In code-switching, for example, two linguistic systems, while remaining separate, are brought into contact. Change of language from one sentence to the following; starting a new topic or an utterance in a given language then switching to the other and continuing utterance in the other language, code-switching has been hard at work.
