1 June 2023

In addition to flying on our long-awaited grand tours in early-April, our Form 5 students went on a trip with a dozen of teachers to a cross-border journey to 愛飛客科普基地 on 10 May 2023 as a part of their education on citizenship and social development, which no doubt includes national security education.  While security is a serious matter, especially for aviation concerns, many are actually common sense and everyday practice.

 

We understand how difficult it is to pronounce some of the letters of the alphabet over the phone; the same difficulty was experienced during wartime, or by present day pilots. There have been different sets of alphabets for clear pronunciations, namely allied military phonetic spelling alphabet, NATO alphabet, or International Civil Aviation Organization alphabet (ICAO), and so on. Most have very similar words or pronunciations in different Germanic/Italic languages. The list below comes from the 2008 ICAO version:

 

Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo

Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett

Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar

Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango

Uniform, Victor, Whisky, X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu

 

They are far from our usual “A for Apple, B for Boy, …”. Of course, anyone can set their own alphabet vocabulary, but suffice to say a commonly-used set will be easier for use among all. The list above includes 8 common first names, 4 regions, 2 dances, the rest cannot be categorized easily: alfa, bravo, delta, golf, hotel, kilo, November, papa, uniform, whisky, Xray, Yankee.

 

While military security is a serious matter, I never want any war. But some knowledge about everyday use of this function may help us, say, on the phone. There must be many other serious learning items which we can put to use in everyday life in a lighter way; note that knowledge is only useful when we put it to use, and allow it to lead us to enhance peace and civilization. We learned about the past to inform the future. There had been too many wars, between countries, within a country, and sometimes a government against its people. I am sure students have ample channels to learn about mistakes made in the past for history cannot be erased, bear in mind, and affirm that military or any form of violence and weapons should not be used to destroy each other.

 

Anson Yang