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.
2 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."
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