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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

> A community of air traffic control roleplayers gets torn apart by a lawsuit, and the founders scatter, trying to pick up the pieces.

it's kinda fascinating such a community exists

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For those interested, I think these are the main virtual ATC services:

https://www.pilotedge.net - paid service, used by student pilots

https://www.vatsim.net - totally free with regional chapters all over the world. Have their own certification system for pilots and ATC.

Both of these work for multiple different flight simulators and not just MS FS. They work through an in game plugin that connects to their servers. Both take things pretty seriously.

People like all sorts of things.

There are various reasons to enjoy this but not actually become ATC:

- its fairly common that people don’t want to ruin their hobby by making it their job

- ATC requirements are pretty strict for application

- US ATC is high stress and stagnant pay, and that combination means there is an ATC shortage which means that the employed ATCs are being worked very hard

Many do it to get practice speaking English, which makes it mostly a win-win as players get to have controllers who take the game seriously and the controllers get to hone their language skills. It's only a problem if someone's accent is very heavy or they haven't achieved enough English skills yet to be able to communicate the basics of ATC but neither happens very often.

Sometimes I can tell where my ESL coworkers learned English based on phrasing and idioms. It would be interesting to come across someone who honed English skills with such a domain-specific application.

Look up "do the needful". It's not a myth, just regional.

Oh man this is a flashback to a previous job that I did not need.

I've heard this phrase used by non-native English speakers, but are you suggesting it comes from practicing within a particular domain? If so, which?

Garbage-tier S Pacific IT industry contractors.

It's an old British English phrasing that is still used in many former British colonies. For example, India.

Also using "doubt" as synonymous with "question".

There was a pretty interesting cluster of threads here on HN a while ago about English in business environments with lots of anecdotes about learning English in various "non-English" societies.

I was told I speak like writing of LotR. Must be true since that's really how I learned English.

Negative. Mike Uniform Lima, please descend to flight level one zero, turn heading zero tree one abeam Sierra and request alternate approach.

I picked up a lot of conversational english because the TV Show Friends was on pretty much during the entire afternoon when I was a teenager and I would spend most of my time after school watching it.

Since I spent a lot of time in english-speaking professional environments for the last few years I managed to deviate a little bit from "Friends style" speak but I still end up saying "like" often if I start rambling.

A lot of people I know also have a bit of a vice with the word "like" and picked it up from Friends as well, it's an interesting thing to notice.

I worked with a mainframe operator that learned English from I love Lucy. It was interesting..

He honned in the Ricky pretty well I thought it was a gag but no its how he learned.

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