Aviation English by Revise Before Flight

Flight Log of Lost Words: Five Haunted Stories from Aviation HistorySome words carry more than meaning.

They carry echoes of old fears, forgotten stories, and the strange history of flight.In this Halloween edition of Flight Log of Lost Words, we uncover five curious entries from aviation's darker past:
✈️ GREMLINS IN THE WORKS — the imaginary creatures blamed for unexplained mechanical faults.
⚡ ST. ELMO'S FIRE — an eerie electrical glow once surrounded by superstition.
🛩️ COFFIN CORNER — the narrow aerodynamic margin encountered at high altitude.
📻 MAYDAY — the distress call whose origins reach across the English Channel.
🌑 ON A WING AND A PRAYER — an expression born from wartime aviation and the hope of making it home.

Five expressions, five stories, and a reminder that the language of aviation has a history as fascinating as flight itself.

🎧 Open the flight log, if you dare.
Explore more Aviation English resources at ReviseBeforeFlight.com

Episode 24: Mid-Flight Compound Nouns: Three Everyday Expressions

What happens when a phrasal verb becomes a noun? Discover the pattern behind three familiar Aviation English expressions: level-off, handoff, and readback.
Explore how these compound nouns work in operational communication and sharpen your language beyond the checklist.

🎧 Listen, refine your language, and keep learning beyond the checklist.
ReviseBeforeFlight.com

High or tall?
✈️ In Episode 23 of The Skybound Dictionary, we explore the difference between these two deceptively simple words:
🔹 TALL → physical height
🔹 HIGH → position, elevation, level or degree From tall towers to high altitude, discover how to choose the right word for precise aviation English. The right word. The right meaning.
🎧 Listen now — and keep your aviation English sharp.

In this episode of aviation English by Revise Before Flight, I look at the language used to describe the recent Amazon Prime Air runway excursion at Miami International Airport.

What is the difference between overran and excursion? Why does the NTSB use struck rather than hit? And what exactly are navigational aids and equipment?
Using the NTSB’s own wording, I explore three vocabulary choices that can help pilots and aviation professionals communicate more precisely - especially when discussing accidents and incidents.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
✈️ overran vs excursion
✈️ struck vs hit
✈️ navigational aids vs equipment
✈️ how register and precision matter in aviation English
✈️ how official accident-reporting language differs from everyday English
The NTSB investigation is ongoing, so I’ll focus on the language used to describe the event, not on drawing conclusions about its cause.

🎙️ ICAO Booster #1 — How To Describe Turbulence Precisely

Turbulence can be routine — or it can become a genuine operational concern. In this first episode of the ICAO Booster series, I break down exactly how to describe turbulence with precision: from grammar (why turbulence is uncountable) to intensity (light, moderate, severe, extreme) to the difference between occasional and intermittent. Using a real NTSB report on United Airlines Flight 115, I'll see how professional aviation language turns an ordinary in-flight event into a precise operational description — right down to a Level 5/6 phrase you can learn by heart.

✈️ Read the accompanying blog post with a visual summary and phraseology notes:
https://revisebeforeflight.com/how-to-describe-turbulence-precisely/

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Have an idea for a future episode?
emilia@revisebeforeflight.com
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