It is used not only in the civil aviation community but also by the militaries of NATO countries. The ICAO phonetic alphabet is also known as the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet or the NATO phonetic alphabet. Be free from any association with objectionable meaningsĪfter going through several permutations and revisions in the early 1950s, the ICAO alphabet that was released in 1956 is still in use today.Have a similar spelling in at least English, French, and Spanish, and the initial letter must be the letter the word identifies.Have good radio transmission and readability characteristics.Be easily pronounced and recognized by airmen of all languages.Be a “live word” in the English, French, and Spanish languages.To be considered, words must meet the following criteria: The ICAO defined a word-spelling alphabet as “a conventional code of highly intelligible and non-confusable words for use in identifying letters of the alphabet.” After reviewing over 200 systems and consulting linguistics professors, the team created a set of criteria that the words included in their “word-spelling alphabet” must meet. Starting in the late 1940s, the ICAO team collected information on as many phonetic alphabet systems as they could find. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), took on the project of developing such an alphabet for the civilian aviation sector. While this worked well internally, there was still a need for a standardized international radio telephony alphabet. Prior to the 1950s, military and civilian personnel in countries around the world each used their own version of a phonetic alphabet. This idea naturally carried over into radio communications as well. By using a word to represent a letter, the listener would be more apt to correctly understand the message even with garbled transmissions. Each letter of the alphabet was paired with a designated, easily understandable word starting with the corresponding letter. Operators quickly came up with standardized telephone spelling alphabets that could be used by both parties to clarify ambiguous letters. Now imagine living back in the early days of telephone when the connection was not remotely as good and the audio nowhere near as crisp as it is today. Was that an “m” or an “n?” Even today most of us have experienced the frustration of trying to communicate the spelling of our name, a street name, or other information over the phone only to have the other party not understand it.
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