Talking with ATC

I am going to diverge a bit from my peers here, with the warning that I am huge stickler for radio communications.

Your aircraft number needs to be at the end, not the front, of anything you read back. If you put your callsign at the front of a read back, it sounds like an instruction from the tower to you. This is not a matter of etiquette, it is how we tell if a transmission is an instruction or a read back.

The order does matter because often times ATC will issue instructions in the order they want you to do things. Example: “United 232, slow to 250 kts, then descend and maintain 5,000”. There is clearly an order to what ATC is asking of the pilots in that scenario.

An even simpler example is taxing. Say you land and ATC says: “United 232, taxi to the Northports via T10, A9, and B.” Those taxiways need to be followed in precisely that order, so the instructions need to be read back in that order.

When you start flying to Europe you will find that the oceanic and European controllers are even more precise in their radio procedures and expect the same of us.

Now at 14 hours, this is not a big deal. But you do need to work on reading things back in the order they were issued to you, with your call sign at the end.

Chris

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