Mercy for My Flight Radiotelephone Operator's Certificate

Today, I passed the examination for my (Restricted) Flight Radiotelephone Operator’s Certificate I, also known as the BZF I.

However, it didn’t go as smoothly as I expected. During practice, communicating over the (imaginary) radio went well, so I thought that would be the easy part. To obtain the certificate, I also had to answer 75 out of 100 multiple-choice questions correctly and translate an English message into German. It turned out I was very wrong—I almost failed the practical part. But let's start at the beginning.

The day started with all 15 of our class meeting in a parking area near the Bundesnetzagentur in Reutlingen, more or less by coincidence, as we all arrived around the same time.

After everyone dealt with parking tickets (or not)—which meant several of us paid for one of our two girls because the ticket machine didn’t accept cards and she didn’t have cash, and someone accidentally paid for two days instead of just a few hours—we entered the building. The whole situation was quite wholesome. We really were like a school class, all because we had seen each other six days a week for three weeks. Even though I don’t really miss school or college, I do miss the part where you hang out with the people you see every day and slowly become better and better friends. Anyway.

After we were let in, we were put into a waiting room. What was particularly memorable was that there were nice drawings of aircraft hanging on the walls, with a sign indicating they were for sale. We joked that they were just making us wait until we got bored enough to actually consider buying some of the drawings. There was no price tag though.

When we were let into the examination room for the first time, we all sat down for the multiple-choice part. I struggled a little because we had only been given 63 questions to practice, so a few of the 100 were completely new to me. But common sense, mixed with a bit of luck, was enough. I don’t know how close it was, because they didn’t tell us, only whether we passed. Everyone passed. Everything was cool.

Then most of us started discussing the English practice messages and how difficult they were to translate. I didn’t mention that I hadn’t even looked at them because I was so confident in my English. I started to get a little anxious because everyone else seemed so anxious. I basically had no idea what they were so stressed out about.

They are going to give us an English message with some aviation context, and we’ll have to translate it. What’s the matter? Why is everyone so anxious?? What am I missing???

After a while, I accepted that most of them were probably anxious because they are still young and haven’t had as much time as I have to immerse themselves in English through all kinds of media: movies, books, games, music, etc.

Then no-cash girl¹ went into the room alone to prove her English proficiency. When she came back after what felt like an eternity, she passed but was really mad. She told us how one of the examiners had been mean to her. She couldn’t translate “assign” under the pressure, and he said, “You should know this,” essentially threatening to fail her if she couldn’t translate it, among other things. I don’t know if this is a fair account of what actually happened, since I wasn’t in the room, but as far as I could tell, she was genuinely quite mad. It wasn’t just for show; there was definitely at least some truth in it. I was starting to get more anxious.

Then the next few went in, and they all came back very quickly, sharing a completely different story of what had happened in that room. Most of them didn’t even have to translate the full text. The examiners just said that was enough, and they passed. I felt bad for no-cash girl because her experience had been so much worse. She told us that she had to explain every detail of every sentence, and all their questions had made her really nervous. Hearing how everybody else had such a great experience only made her feel worse about her own. But soon enough, she could laugh about it, so it wasn’t too bad. Before we all moved on, I considered making a joke about how she had taken one for the team by setting the lower bar, so now they would have to let everybody pass who was better than her, but I didn’t, because I was sure it wouldn’t be as funny as it sounded in my head. It would just be another “This is why you’re single, ek” moment.

When it was my turn, I struggled a lot more than I expected (which was zero). I realized I actually do not translate English sentences into German in my head to understand them; I just understand them in English and accept them as they are. So all my English experience almost meant nothing, because I had never actually done what was now asked of me: explain to someone what I understood in German, using German words to explain English words. I felt quite arrogant for having dismissed the trickiness of the task, never having even tried to translate a message before, and for overestimating my own proficiency. What’s even worse is that I tend to consider myself quite humble because I don’t express my arrogance, but maybe that’s part of my arrogance.

Because the sentences were also quite long, and sentence structures are different in English, it wasn’t obvious how to translate a full sentence into German in a way that made sense, even though the sentence in English made sense to me. I suddenly had a lot of empathy for no-cash girl. They let me pass and leave once I could at least confidently answer questions about details of the English message. It was about the standard procedures during an emergency.

to be continued