International air travel created a need for a worldwide standard. Many (loosely or strictly) standardized spelling alphabets exist, mostly owing to historical siloization, where each organization simply created its own. However, to gain the advantages of standardization in contexts involving trained persons, a standard version can be convened by an organization. For example, it is common to hear a nonce form like "A as in 'apple', D as in 'dog', P as in 'paper'" over the telephone in customer support contexts. For example, in the Latin alphabet, the letters B, P, and D ("bee", "pee" and "dee") sound similar and could easily be confused, but the words "bravo", "papa" and "delta" sound completely different, making confusion unlikely.Īny suitable words can be used in the moment, making this form of communication easy even for people not trained on any particular standardized spelling alphabet. This avoids any confusion that could easily otherwise result from the names of letters that sound similar, except for some small difference easily missed or easily degraded by the imperfect sound quality of the apparatus. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them. Some use standard pronunciation and others are modified slightly for ease of comprehension on the air.įor additional learning, check out the Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms.A spelling alphabet ( also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. In addition to the phonetic alphabet, pilots should also be familiar with the ICAO aviation numerals. Below is the current ICAO alphabet along with the phonetic pronunciations and emphasis placements for each word. The ICAO alphabet consists of twenty-six letter and word pairings. Public safety organizations use a phonetic alphabet as well, but in the United States, those agencies use the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials-International (APCO) rather than ICAO alphabet. It is used not only in the civil aviation community but also by the militaries of NATO countries. The ICAO phonetic alphabet is also known as the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet or the NATO phonetic alphabet.
#Icao radiotelephony spelling alphabet free
Have good radio transmission and readability characteristics.Be easily pronounced and recognized by airmen of all languages.Be a “live word” in the English, French, and Spanish languages.To be considered, words must meet the following criteria:
#Icao radiotelephony spelling alphabet code
The ICAO defined a word-spelling alphabet as “a conventional code of highly intelligible and non-confusable words for use in identifying letters of the alphabet.” After reviewing over 200 systems and consulting linguistics professors, the team created a set of criteria that the words included in their “word-spelling alphabet” must meet.
Starting in the late 1940s, the ICAO team collected information on as many phonetic alphabet systems as they could find. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), took on the project of developing such an alphabet for the civilian aviation sector. While this worked well internally, there was still a need for a standardized international radio telephony alphabet. Prior to the 1950s, military and civilian personnel in countries around the world each used their own version of a phonetic alphabet. This idea naturally carried over into radio communications as well. By using a word to represent a letter, the listener would be more apt to correctly understand the message even with garbled transmissions.
Each letter of the alphabet was paired with a designated, easily understandable word starting with the corresponding letter. Operators quickly came up with standardized telephone spelling alphabets that could be used by both parties to clarify ambiguous letters. Now imagine living back in the early days of telephone when the connection was not remotely as good and the audio nowhere near as crisp as it is today. Was that an “m” or an “n?” Even today most of us have experienced the frustration of trying to communicate the spelling of our name, a street name, or other information over the phone only to have the other party not understand it.
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