Why Mayday? Understanding This Distress Signal
The term mayday was conceived by Frederick Stanley Mockford an officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport England in the early s Mockford was tasked with thinking of a word that would indicate distress and be easily understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency Given the significant air traffic between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris Mockford proposed the term mayday the phonetic equivalent of the French m'aider a short form of venez m'aider meaning come and help me The Introduction of MaydayFollowing tests the new procedure word was introduced for cross-Channel flights in February Mayday replaced the previous distress call the Morse code signal SOS which was not considered suitable for voice communication due to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter S by telephone In the International Radiotelegraph Convention of Washington D C adopted the voice call mayday as the radiotelephone distress call in addition to
