Sugar, Hippo and Fridge

RTH had a mildly valid point while watching the video from my latest flight. As I pointed out in this post, I am getting better at flying through the bumpy stuff, but do tend to shout out at random. Kind of a turbulence Tourette’s if you like! Mostly this is harmless, Bob has probably resigned himself to the fact that I have an extensive repertoire of profanity to draw from and plan on using it, he’s a big boy and has probably heard worse*. 

The potential issue pointed out by RTH is a fair one though, he watched the video, heard my random shouts and said “One of these days, you’re going to do that with your finger on the radio trigger.” Now I hate to admit he’s right but it could be a real possibility! One with potentially nasty consequences. One of the questions I had to answer for my radio exam was “what’s the penalty for using profane or obscene language on the radio?” I got that one right as well, so no excuses for not knowing that I could potentially be fined $5000 for an inadvertent slip of the tongue**

So what’s the answer? Well given that I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m always going to be a loud flyer and that I’m never going to like turbulence, I’m just going to have to watch what comes out of my mouth! Therefore I’m actively developing my use of the title words of this post.  I figure that people might be puzzled by a random “fridge” coming over the radio but not offended!

You may ask (if you have the slightest interest, which I doubt!) why that particular trio of words?  Well I think that sugar and fridge are fairly self-explanatory, for their phonetic similarities to their profane counterparts.  Hippo takes a bit of an explanation, let’s just suffice to say its 1) a bit of an “in joke” between RTH and I and 2) it’s my go to word when I can’t find the one I’m looking for.  I’m actually surprised I don’t use it more often when flying. I’m fully expecting one day that I’ll make a position call claiming that I’m “2 miles south west of….. ah….oh…. hippo!”

  

*Bob, incidentally, never ever loses his cool, let alone swears. I’ve tried to impale us on the edge of the runway before and he didn’t even raise his voice! Seriously, where do they teach skills like that? I could use some lessons!

 ** I nearly wrote “an inadvertent F@#!K” – but that could really be taken the wrong way!!