Aviation English Corpus: A new approach to ATCC

With rapidly expanding air traffic worldwide, the demands on air traffic control communication (ATCC) are constantly increasing. This represents a major issue for maintaining safe operation. One of the most efficient ways of investigating ATCC is via corpus linguistic techniques, which allow robust systematic analysis of very large amounts of data from real communications between pilots and controllers. Corpus analyses thus enable us to uncover potential weak spots in ATCC, which can be addressed in pilot and controller training.

Our aim is to create a large corpus of (routine as well as non-routine) Aviation English and use sophisticated quantitative methods to identify and visualise patterns of language use. In this project, we will draw on the existing infrastructure and support from the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University, one of the world’s leading centres for corpus research, which has recently been awarded the Queen’s Prize for Higher Education.

We are seeking strategic partners who can help the project by giving access to recordings of (routine and non-routine) ATCC or would like to support the project in other ways.

A more detailed description of the project is available here.

Contact: Dr. Dana Gablasova, email: d.gablasova@lancaster.ac.uk