From BRAVE AI:
Mayday Radio Call Origin
The term “mayday” was conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, an officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport in England. He proposed the term “mayday,” which is the phonetic equivalent of the French “m’aider” (a short form of “venez m’aider,” meaning “come [and] help me”) because much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris.
The term was introduced for cross-Channel flights in February 1923 and was officially adopted by the International Radiotelegraph Convention of Washington, D.C., in 1927, replacing the Morse code signal SOS, which was not suitable for voice communication.
Today, “mayday” is used internationally as a distress signal in voice-procedure radio communications, primarily by aviators and mariners, and it is required to be repeated three times in a row during the initial emergency declaration to ensure it is not mistaken for other similar-sounding words or phrases.
Paris is beautiful.
AVIATION HISTORY PING TO POST #5....................
Cool info, thanks for looking that up. It makes perfect sense.
Why did Communists co-opt May Day as their annual tribute to mass murder?
That was interesting — thanks!
Yes, Paris is beautiful, but don’t visit Europe around May Day. It’s their equivalent of our Labor Day and the hotels are all booked up.