Editing Mayday (section)

==History==
The "mayday" procedure word was conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, officer-in-charge of radio at [[Croydon Airport]], England. He had been asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency.<ref>{{cite web|title=It's MayDay – But That Means Trouble for Aviators|date=May 2017|url=http://yorkshireairmuseum.org/journal/its-mayday-but-that-means-trouble-for-aviators/|access-date=31 March 2018|archive-date=24 March 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190324195512/http://yorkshireairmuseum.org/journal/its-mayday-but-that-means-trouble-for-aviators/|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first1=Bob |last1=Learmonth |first2=Joanna |last2=Nash |first3=Douglas |last3=Cluett |year=1977 |title=The First Croydon Airport 1915–1928 |publisher=London Borough of Sutton Libraries and Arts Services |place=Sutton |isbn=978-0-9503224-3-8 |page=55 }}</ref> Since much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and [[Le Bourget Airport]] in Paris, he proposed the term "mayday", the phonetic equivalent of the French {{lang|fr|m'aider}} (a short form of {{lang|fr|venez m'aider}}, "come [and] help me").<ref>{{OED|Mayday}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mayday|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170617112032/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mayday|url-status=dead|archive-date=17 June 2017|title=Mayday – Definition of Mayday in English by Oxford Dictionaries|website=Oxford Dictionaries – English|access-date=31 August 2020}}</ref> (''Venez m'aider'' is standard French but ''m'aidez'' is not; the standard is ''Aidez-moi''.) The term is unrelated to the holiday [[May Day]].

Following tests, the new procedure word was introduced for [[English Channel|cross-Channel]] flights in February 1923.<ref name="times1923">{{cite news |title=New air distress signal |newspaper=[[The Times]] |date=2 February 1923 |issue=43255 |page=7 }}</ref> The previous distress call had been the [[Morse code]] signal [[SOS]], but this was not considered suitable for voice communication, "[o]wing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter 'S' by telephone".<ref name="times1923"/> In 1927, the [[International Telecommunication Union|International Radiotelegraph Convention]] of Washington, D.C. adopted the voice call "mayday" as the radiotelephone distress call in addition to the SOS radiotelegraph (Morse code) signal.<ref>{{cite book |url=http://search.itu.int/history/HistoryDigitalCollectionDocLibrary/4.39.43.en.100.pdf |title=International Radiotelegraph Convention of Washington, 1927 |chapter=Article 19: Distress, alarm, urgency, and safety signals |publisher=HMSO |location=London |year=1929 |orig-date=1928 |pages=80–89 |access-date=9 January 2021 |archive-date=15 January 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210115192356/http://search.itu.int/history/HistoryDigitalCollectionDocLibrary/4.39.43.en.100.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref>