Air Traffic Management Editing and Proofreading Services

A controller says "descend to three thousand" and a pilot reads back "descending to three three thousand." Nobody catches the extra digit for eleven seconds, during which the aircraft is briefly at an altitude assigned to someone else. The occurrence report that follows has to reconstruct exactly what was said, what was heard, and where the elevenSecond gap in the correction actually came from, because a report that concludes "readback error, remedial training given" and stops there will not catch the next one.

We edit what air traffic controllers, safety investigators and ATC providers produce — mandatory occurrence reports and loss-of-separation write-ups, readback and hearback error analysis, unit safety case documentation, controller training and simulator debrief material, letters of agreement between adjacent units, NOTAM drafting guidance, and the safety bulletins issued after an investigation closes. Our editors work on the exact transcript of what was said against what should have happened.

The transcript reconstruction is what makes an occurrence report useful rather than merely filed, and its failure is a narrative summary that paraphrases what was said instead of quoting it. Paraphrase loses the exact word that caused the error. We work through these so the actual words spoken and read back are transcribed verbatim from the recording, since "three thousand" and "three three thousand" are different reports and a summary that says "an error occurred in the readback" erases the distinction that matters; so the time between the error and its correction is stated in seconds, given that eleven seconds at a busy hour and eleven seconds on a quiet night are different findings about how the error was allowed to persist; so contributing factors are separated from the immediate cause, because a report that lists workload, phraseology and equipment as equally weighted causes gives nobody a specific thing to fix; so similar-sounding callsigns or clearances active at the same time are named, as many errors trace to two aircraft on frequency with confusable identifiers; so the recommendation is something a unit can actually implement, rather than a general call for vigilance, since vigilance is not a corrective action; and so the report distinguishes an isolated slip from a pattern, given that the same error type recurring across different controllers points at a phraseology or display problem rather than an individual one. Reports written this way close out and actually change something.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including safety data, personnel involved and investigation material. We are editors rather than air traffic controllers, safety investigators or regulators, and we offer no view on causation, blame or operational procedure. What we can do is make sure the reconstruction is precise enough to be useful.