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Radio messages in Five miles Out

There are a number of radio messages, or references to aircraft terms in the song. One is the radio message:

"Mayday mayday mayday
Calling all stations
This is Golf Mike Oscar Victor Juliet
IMC cu nimb icing
In great difficulty
Over"

Mayday

The pilots' version of SOS, repeated three times to indicate the beginning of an urgent emergency message.

Calling all stations

... not only one because he's really in trouble.

Golf Mike Oscar Victor Juliet

This spells out GMOVJ, which is kind of the plane's licence number. Look at the painting on the album, you can actually see the letters on the plane. This is a callsign asigned to Scotland (The two first letters (GM) say that). Radio Callsigns prefix are internationally stablished and assigned each one to one country.

IMC

"Instrument Meteorological Conditions", meaning that the weather is so bad that he can't see anything and has to fly by instruments only. This is because he's flying through:

cu nimb

which means "cumulonimbus" which are bad-weather clouds, bringing lots of turbulence, rain, hail, and:

icing

Ice is getting on the wings and propeller blades of the plane, which is extremely dangerous because it will disturb their aerodynamic shape. With enough icing, the plane is sure to go down.

In great difficulty

Nothing to explain about that...

Over

Terminates the radio message. Unix people would say Ctrl-D.

Another one is "squawk emergency":

"Squawk". Airplanes are required nowadays to carry a small radio transmitter which transmits a small amount of airplane information to control towers and such so that they can identify those strange blips on their radar screens. When they "squawk", they send this information out. I guess "Squawk emergency" means to send this information on a special emergency band.

(This spurred a comment.) This is basically correct, with the following data: The "transmitter" is a RADAR transponder. This is a device that only transmits when it receives a request to do so (it "Transmits a Response", hence "TranSponder").

The Controller on the ground identifies an aircraft by observing specific codes that are displayed along with the RADAR image. Now, it's computerised, but when I was familliar with this system, we used to have to decode little lines next to the RADAR image!

An aircraft will have four dials, 0 to 7 on each dial. The controller tells the plane what code to "squawk" so that they can be identified. This is dialed into the transponder by means of the wheels, usually something like "1212". When the RADAR sweeps the aircraft, the transponder sends out the dialed-in code and the RADAR computer identifies the aircraft on the controller's screen.

7700 is the EMERGENCY code number! This lights up RADAR screens all over! When an aircraft sets this code, people pay attention!

After exhausting the mailing list Amaroks resources, we turned to the man himself in the list interview for a definition of "Lost in static 18, Automatic 18":

"If you look at the cover of Five Miles Out, the plane is a Beech 18. If your radio is breaking up, the control tower would tell you "Lost in static" and then give the call-sign, so it was "Lost in static, 18". It was just one of the lyrics I scribbled down one evening in the pub! When I was writing that song I just scribbled down anything I could think of to do with aeroplanes, and then assembled them into lyrics."