Mayday - M'aidez(Help Me)

Mayday - M'aidez(Help Me)

Mayday is an internationally recognized radio word to signal distress. It's used mostly by aircraft and boats, and most of us are happily only familiar with it through TV and fiction. 

There was a lot of air traffic between England and France in 1923, and evidently there were enough international problems over the English Channel that both parties wanted to find a good distress signal that everyone would understand.

S.O.S

But surely there already was a distress signal that everyone understood? There was—S.O.S.—but there were some problems with it:

Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter "S" by telephone, the international distress signal "S.O.S." will give place to the words "May-day", the phonetic equivalent of "M'aidez", the French for "Help me."

—"New Air Distress Signal," The Times [London], 2 Feb. 1923

SOS was most commonly used in telegraphic communications, where the unmistakable pattern of SOS in Morse code (...---...) was easy to remember and easy to decipher. SOS was used predominantly by ships that were in distress.

 Aircraft, by comparison, used radio and not telegraph as their primary means of communication, and when in distress, a pilot wouldn't have time to clarify to anyone listening that they meant S as in "Sam" and not F as in "Frank." A short, easily understood word that couldn’t be mistaken for something else was necessary.

Supposedly, mayday was coined by Frederick Stanley Mockford, a senior radio officer in Croydon.


Compiled by 
Ms Naresh kuwar 

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