One of the most common ways in which you might hear the NATO phonetic alphabet when listening to airband radio is when aircraft are told to taxi on certain taxiway. Uses of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet in Civil Aviation Now, let’s take a look at what the actual alphabet looks like, starting with the words used to spell the 26 letters of the standard English alphabet:Īs for numbers, while the words themselves are the same, four of them are pronounced differently from their standard English pronunciation to avoid confusion with other similar words that might be used during radio communication (such as fire and the German word for “no,” “nein”). And, since then, it has been adopted by many organizations including the International Civil Aviation Organization. The NATO phonetic alphabet as we know it today wasn’t adopted until 1957. to decrease the chances for misunderstanding and misrepresentation as much as possible. This involved comparing the words to similar words in several major languages including English, French, etc. The first such internationally recognized alphabet was developed by the International Radio Consultative Committee (the predecessor of the International Telecommunication Union).įrom there on, research has been conducted into what the ideal words to use were and what their pronunciation should be. The use of this kind of alphabets later on spread into the civil world as well. Initially, they were mainly used in military radio communications – they were a necessity as the low quality of transmissions often led to misunderstandings in the technology’s beginnings. Since the alphabet is also used extensively in aviation – both civil and military – I decided to write this article looking a bit at its history, as well as at the alphabet itself and its uses in civil aviation.Ī Brief History of the NATO Phonetic AlphabetĪlphabets like the NATO phonetic alphabet have been in use for about a century now. If you ever watched a war movie or similar, you likely heard of “Zulu time.” Similarly, you might have encountered people using words like “Alpha” and “Bravo” when trying to spell something out.Īll of those words are code words that NATO assigned to letters in the alphabet and turned into the NATO phonetic alphabet to make it easier to spell things over the radio and to avoid confusion.
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