How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

The first group to fully go in for English was the air traffic controllers. Aviation, being technically complex and profoundly international, is an area where standards are vital. A common language is especially so, given the paramount importance of clear communication in the skies. In the 1950s a Soviet plane carrying the USSR’s foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to London twice overshot Heathrow Airport and nearly crashed because the pilot struggled to understand the control tower’s instructions. Yet such misunderstandings are happily rare, for when the rules of the international aviation system were agreed upon in 1944, a standard language was chosen for international flights. It was, not surprisingly, English. This wasn’t a choice made because of a desire to turn the world Anglophone. It was made from necessity: there had to be one language, and the United States at that point was responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s passenger miles.