In response to your Comment, 'The Last Resort' (Flight International, 13-19 November), you say that "direct contact with the interceptor should be attempted using the emergency frequency 121.5MHz or the military's more often used UHF band 243.0MHz".

It must be noted that few civil aircraft are equipped with UHF. Second, 243.0MHz has an in-built override function which results in blocking out any communication on another UHF frequency, once 243.0MHz is being keyed by any ground or aircraft station. Civil aircraft do not have this function.

Although shoot-downs of airliners happen rarely, once is too often.

Despite the lack of a common language, the International Civil Aviation Organisation interception signals are "the common language". South America predominantly officially uses Spanish, France officially uses French, Russia and many former Soviet Union satellite states use Russian and the rest of the world tries to use English. Unfortunately, many are not fluent in English.

The commentary on the confusion over interception procedures should worry passengers. If IATA thinks they must tell the flying public that the pilots of its member carriers have forgotten the intercept procedures and signals, then other safety regularatory bodies would have to come into play. Pilots, not knowing such basics, should be replaced immediately.

The case of the Go flight crossing the Spanish/French border must be a bad example for an interception, because you say that the flight was adhering to the route as per flight plan, and its transponder was functioning. In such case ATC would normally suggest interception of the aircraft for assistance only if needed. That, however, seemed unnecessary. Otherwise, many more flights experiencing part or total radio communication failure would all have to be intercepted.

I am convinced that the bigger risk lies in the fact that civil aircraft experience radio communication failure far too often.

Frank Fisher

President, International Advisory Group Air Navigation Services Stallwang, Germany

Source: Flight International

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