Why do pilots say roger? From R to received
Pilots say “roger” to mean “I received your message”. The word stands for the letter R, and R stood for “received”. For decades the American military spelled R as “Roger” over the radio, and the word outlived the alphabet it came from.
What roger means, officially
The Federal Aviation Administration keeps a glossary of the words pilots and air traffic controllers are supposed to use. Its definition is short: “ROGER — I have received all of your last transmission.” It adds a warning that most people miss: roger “should not be used to answer a question requiring a yes or a no answer.” For that, pilots are supposed to say “affirmative” or “negative”.
So roger does not mean yes, and it does not mean “I will do it”. It only means the message arrived. If a pilot wants to say they understand an instruction and will follow it, the FAA glossary has a different word: “WILCO — I have received your message, understand it, and will comply with it.” Wilco is short for “will comply”.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?From R to Roger
In radio procedure the letter R was shorthand for “received”. Spoken alone, single letters are easy to mishear over static, so operators used spelling alphabets, with a word for every letter.
The US Navy’s history command publishes the old alphabets side by side, and the letter R tells the story. In the 1913 version R was “Rush”. In 1927 it became “Roger”, and it stayed Roger in the 1938 version and through the Second World War, alongside other words in the same list such as Baker, Dog and Easy. Saying “Roger” was therefore just a clear way of saying R, which meant received.
The dictionary site Etymonline dates the radio use of roger, meaning “yes, I understand”, to 1941 in the US military, and notes it is said to have been used the same way by Britain’s Royal Air Force since 1938.
Why it survived Romeo
In 1957 the alphabet changed again, and R became “Romeo”, the word still used today in the alphabet that begins Alfa, Bravo, Charlie. By then roger had been used on the radio for years. It no longer worked as the name of a letter. It worked as a word in its own right, meaning “got it”.
That is why no one says “romeo” to acknowledge a message. The spelling alphabet moved on, and the acknowledgement stayed behind.
Roger that, and other mistakes
The popular phrase “roger that” is redundant by the book, since roger already means “I received that”. And the phrase “roger, wilco” says the same thing twice, because wilco already includes “I have received your message”. Radio procedure prizes short, unambiguous words, and roger has lasted because it is exactly that: two syllables that say the message got through, and nothing more.