Mandarin Meters

Flew to Guangzhou (sometimes known as Canton) a few days ago. It's a very large Chinese city about 120km inland from Hong-Kong, although from the air it looks connected to H-K in one huge urban sprawl. I'm ashamed to say I didn't have any idea this place, or the 9 million people that live in it, existed a few weeks ago. I always pictured Hong-Kong as an isolated city in the middle of I-don't-know-what ... but that's not the point.

The point is that this flight was my first ever encounter with metric altitudes. Most of the aviation world uses feet to express altitudes and will instruct us to maintain an altitude in feet. In China and Russia, for some probably communist reason, altitudes are measured in meters, separation is in meters, ATC tells us to fly meters, but the 'bus only speaks feet so we have to check a reference table every time we're given a new level.

That in itself isn't such a big deal, but ATC also speaks Mandarin to Chinese aircraft and that is very very unnerving.

I always used to scorn the people who complained about ATC being provided in French over France and Québec. I speak French so could follow what was going on easily - and even if I didn't speak the language surely knowing what I had to do would be enough?

Even flying through Spain, where Spanish is spoken along with English, wouldn't feel too odd, I would figure out what's going on using the few Spanish words I know, but being thrown into a completely new country flying to a town I didn't know anything about while flying with weird altitudes and procedures and people who speak a language that doesn't remotely resemble any other language I vaguely have a clue about on the radio really lowered my situational awareness.

I won't say they should start speaking English ... But I think I may try and learn basic aviation instructions in Mandarin before my next flight there, and I hope I go again soon because despite the culture shock and the strange noises on the radio I really feel like I've arrived somewhere different as opposed to Indonesia or Malaysia which, from the cockpit during a 20 minute turn-around, all feels the same somehow.

S.