Why does military use niner

We use affirmative and negative so that there is no misunderstanding by a word that might be chopped off by releasing the push-to-talk button releasing the key too soon. They say Niner instead of just nine so there is no mistake when you say nine. Just like when a word is confirmed spoken one letter at a time using words, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.

That originated with the use of electronic communication. Radios were not the best and "nine" and "five" sounded the same. So they said "niner" and "fife" to differentiate. More than that. Think Luftwaffe. German for zero is NINE. So, when you are dealing with aviation, an international industry, it is necessary to keep from confusing zeros and nines.

Thank you. Skip to content. Search for:. Home » QA. Speaking phonetically helps tree-mendously. And often we'd have to phonetically spell, e. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. As mentioned on the same article : The final choice of code words for the letters of the alphabet and for the digits was made after hundreds of thousands of comprehension tests involving 31 nationalities. Improve this answer. Dave Dave I say tree, and about half the ATC in the area do as well.

Germans struggle with the English "th", it often comes out as "sri" as mentioned above. The Aviation. SE blog will have a series on stuff like this It wouldn't surprise me if the whole country has a similar dialect.

I'd've thought that most of the time, context would make it obvious whether you meant fire or 5 or whether you were saying 'no' in German or 9. But it's surely as easy to mistake a 9 for a 5 as it is to mistake a B for a D, say. A lone survivor pilot coming back from the front didn't want anyone thinking he was a German.

Show 11 more comments. Even if partially anecdotal, it provides significant insight. Show 2 more comments. John John 21 1 1 bronze badge. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook.