Did you know why "Mayday" is the internationally used distress signal?

"Mayday mayday mayday" is the internationally recognized distress call on radio, and you might have wondered why, or how it is connected to May Day, the spring festival with ancient European origins. Turns out, it has nothing to do with the latter, and it's just the English pronunciation of a French phrase.

Ships have used a variety of distress signals throughout history with flags, foghorns, bells and signal flares, but few of these were universally recognized. The appearance of radio in the late 1890s led to a variety of Morse radio signals, but the SOS signal (...---...) became the one to rise to global acknowledgment in the first decade of the 20th century. (Interestingly, Atlantic convoys in World War II that came under attack supplemented the code with suffixes: "SSS" meant a submarine attack, "RRR" and "QQQ" surface and unknown raiders, and “AAA” aircraft.) Once radiotelephones that allowed the transmission of speech appeared, people first just pronounced SOS as "ess-oh-ess," but the "s" sound is hard to distinguish on radio.

In the early 1920s, Frederick Stanley Mockford, the Senior Radio Officer of Croydon Airport, Britain's only international airport between the world wars, was tasked with finding a new, more easily understood word. Much of Croydon's traffic departed for or arrived from Le Bourget Airport in Paris, so Mockford settled on "mayday" because it not only distinctive, but also the phonetic equivalent of the French phrase "m'aidez," "help me," or "m'aider," a shortened version of "venez m'aider,", "come and help me." The phrase was first introduced for cross-Channel flights, and was adopted internationally in 1927.

Related phrases, also derived from the French, are "seelonce mayday," where "seelonce" is the transcription of silence, spelled the same in French and English, and which is a command to keep a frequency clear of traffic and reserved for the mayday situation. Once the situation is resolved, the frequency is given back to regular traffic with "seelonce feenee," "silence finished." "Pan-pan" was derived from French panne, "breakdown," and signals an urgent situation of a lower order than "mayday."

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