Waiting for the AC guy, I was surfing around and came upon some videos talking about the Air India crash. And I started wondering why MAYDAY became the universal call for distress. So, I started looking again. From Wikipedia:
The "mayday" procedure word was conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport, England. He had been asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency.[1][2] Since much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the term "mayday", the phonetic equivalent of the French m'aider.
And there you have it. It was phonetically distinctive and easily understood over the radios of the day. And now you know.
9 comments:
"m'aider" : Fr. for Help me.
How appropriate that it would be the French who contributed the universal word for "Help ME! I cannot save myself."
“I surrender “ was not appropriate in this circumstance, even without a reference to monkeys and cheese.
“ Des singes qui mangent du fromage se rendent” takes too long to say. And sounds like a runny nose
Same with SOS in Morse code. A simple pattern that is easy to recognize even on really noisy channels.
Joe seems spot-on! :-)
And of lesser severity, it wasn't until just a few years ago I heard a Pan-pan call and had to look it up. Also from the French, panne, it seems they have a real thing about not being able to help themselves.
Ironically, this is taught in Navy flight school. Thanks for explaining it!
In Morse, PAN is didddahdahdit didah dahdit. Almost as easy to remember as SOS - dididit dahdahdah dididit.
I believe SOS is just one long string of dits and dahs with no space twixt the characters. I could be wrong.
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