I learned this today. The expression “mayday” was first used in February 1923.
Mayday is used when a plane or a ship is undergoing a life-threatening emergency. The procedure is to say the word three times, “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” This is so that it can’t be issued by mistake.
The expression “mayday” was concocted by the officer in charge of radio at Croydon Airport, England. His name was Frederick Stanley Mockford. In 1922, he was asked to come up with a new word that could be used in distress calls. Up until that point, the morse code signal for SOS was used. People think SOS stands for “Save Our Souls”, but it doesn’t actually stand for anything. The morse code is . . . _ _ _ . . . (three short taps, three long taps, and three short ones again). That is quite difficult to do if your aircraft is undergoing an emergency. It is also easy to mishear as well. Planes relied on radio, and the S of SOS could very easily be mistaken for an F over the radio.
Croydon airport was closed in 1959, but it was Britain’s main airport in the 1920s and 30s, and Britain’s only international airport. After World War 2, people realized that international planes were going to be a lot larger than they used to be. Croydon airport had become surrounded by villages and there was no way of expanding it, so it lost out to Heathrow airport in the end and closed down. However, at the time that Frederick Stanley Mockford worked there, a large majority of the planes came in from Le Bourget Airport, France. He decided to use a word that would be easy to say and easy to hear, so he took the French m’aidez (help me) and created the phonetically similar, and slightly English sounding, word “mayday”.
The word was introduced in February of 1923. It rapidly spread and was adopted as the official distress signal by the United States in 1927.
When a mayday call is made, the pilot has to say the call sign and type of aircraft, the nature of the emergency, the weather, the position of the aircraft, the amount of fuel remaining in minutes, the number of people on board, the pilot’s intentions, and any other relevant information.
When a mayday call is received, it takes priority over all other air traffic. The channel that the emergency vehicle is communicating on must be kept clear of all other communications. To signal that there is an emergency and that the channel can only be used by the aircraft undergoing an emergency and the authorities, the command “seelonce mayday” is given. Just as “mayday” is an anglicized version of m’aidez, “seelonce mayday” is an anglicized version of the French silence m’aidez (silence help me) . The channel must be kept free until the command “seelonce feenee” is given, which is the anglicized version of silence fini (silence finished).
There are two other distress commands that come from the French. Those are pan-pan and sécurité. Pan-pan comes from the French panne, which means “broken”. It is used when there is an emergency on board a plane or ship, but it isn’t life threatening and the crew believe that they can handle it. It is the next distress call down from mayday. If it turns out the crew cannot handle the problem, it can become a mayday call. Pan-pan is also repeated three times, which means pan is said six times: pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan.
Sécurité is the lowest of the distress calls and is usually used to warn other planes or ships of something. It is also repeated three times.
A mayday distress call is only given when a plane is in a dire situation. All priority is given to getting that plane safely down on the ground. Runways are cleared, planes are moved or delayed, everything goes into that one plane’s emergency. Because the crew in the airplane are dealing with the emergency and have their hands and brains full, the air traffic controller’s job is to assist them as much as possible while giving them the time and the silence they need to work the problem. Air traffic controllers use a mnemonic called ASSIST.
Acknowledge – Ensure that the reported emergency is well-understood and acknowledged;
Separate – Establish and maintain separation with other traffic and terrain;
Silence – Impose silence on your control frequency, if necessary; and do not delay or disturb urgent cockpit action by unnecessary transmissions;
Inform – Inform your supervisor and other sectors, units and airports as appropriate;
Support – Provide maximum support to the flight crew; and,
Time – Allow the flight crew sufficient time to manage the emergency.”
Mayday calls are not very common and, despite the fear in the media, most airplane emergencies end in a safe landing. Since 2015, there have been less than a thousand people killed in airplane crashes every year. A thousand people might sound high, but that is 1,000 people out of the 4.5 billion that fly every year.
So, “mayday” was a phrase invented in 1923 to enable pilots to initiate a distress call. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/mayday-meaning-origin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9curit%C3%A9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-pan
https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-does-mayday-mean
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html/chap6_section_3.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croydon_Airport
https://easbcn.com/en/the-origin-of-mayday-in-aviation/
https://skybrary.aero/articles/emergency-communications