Why is ‘Mayday’ a very scary word for Pilots ?

Chaitanya Padukone

After enduring nearly eight months of the corona-pandemic crisis comes this heartening news. It’s a historic landmark for the Bollywood film-industry that both icons Amitabh Bachchan & Ajay Devgn will reunite after seven years for a thrilling, feature-film drama titled ‘Mayday’ ! Produced and directed by Ajay Devgn, it will be an original classic milestone movie to watch out for, And then Ajay is ‘directing’ legend Bachchan-saab for the first time. On the sets this December, Ajay plays a pilot while Bachchan's character is under wraps

Popularly and conventionally, May Day is a celebrated on May 1st also an International Labour Day . In India May Day is celebrated on May 1st as Maharashtra Day and Gujarat Day, as both the Indian states were formed (born) on that day in the year 1960. In most parts of Europe, May Day is celebrated with music and dance as an ancient of spring and a current cultural-traditional spring holiday.

However in this upcoming Hindi mega-movie Mayday, where Ajay Devgn plays an aviation “pilot”, this combined word-phrase will have a different implication. “Mayday” is a standard internationally-used distress call used in any life-threatening major crisis emergency situation, to imply that a major accident or disaster is about to happen and the pilot or captain is calling for immediate rescue assistance. Mayday is ideally said loudly three times in a row, to avoid any confusion over the radio.

The emergency-alert word Mayday originated in 1923, when a senior radio officer, Frederick Stanley Mockford, coined and used it which originated from the French word m’aider meaning “come help me.”

Recently, in a real-life situation, in May 2020 (this year) the pilot of a Pakistan International Airlines jet ( which crashed) sent a “Mayday Mayday, Mayday” (thrice) verbal radio-message and told air-traffic-controllers ( on the ground-level-airport)) the aircraft had lost power from both its engines on its second attempt to land, according to a recording posted on monitoring website. There was no further communication from the ill-fated PIA passenger aircraft pilots, which after failed landing attempts, then crashed in the densely populated residential area of Karachi city in Pakistan.

For those who are fond of world-movie-trivia-gyaan, it would be interesting to know that in Hollywood, ‘Mayday’ was a 2005 American aviation-centric based on the 1979 popular novel by American author Thomas Block. The novel Mayday was updated in 1998 by authors Thomas Block and and re-released as a paperback. The film was directed by and stars , , , , and . It aired on in the United States on October 2, 2005.