Child's Play at JFK Has Adults Fuming Mad

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by CaliforniaChief

When a kid says something that the transcript denotes as unintelligible, I see problems. Look, if he was helping his dad run the Garden City International Airport or calling out commands at Fargo Field, that would be one thing. This is JFK, where things move a mile a minute, pilots speak with a variety of difficult to discern accents, and a chain of movement that cannot allow for confusion. I don't care if it's ground control...bad things can happen there too.

I've always wondered about the language issue with pilots. If you're a pilot flying from Los Angeles to Tokyo, do you have to speak both English and Japanese? That seems unlikely. Do all control towers use English? That also seems unlikely. Do international planes have some sort of auto-translator or a human translator? Those also seem unlikely.

As for the kid, I'm sure they were watching him like a hawk, but as noted above, this is JFK Airport in New York. If the kid messes up a word or decides to have fun and improvise, things could get really, really bad really, really fast.