Narrative:

Two consecutive aircraft; with departure flight plans filed for cty in the ZJX airspace; entered jax airspace VFR and requested to activate their IFR flight plans. Because the flight plans will not print at jax until they are activated; I had no record of the flight plans and no way to find their codes without attempting to full route them in the NAS. I tagged the aircraft VFR and began looking for the IFR flight plans and discovered they were filed at cty. I amended the departure airport to one in jax airspace to generate the strips and issued IFR flight plans. These two aircraft were both being piloted by foreign nationals on cross country IFR solo flights with unacceptable understanding of IFR procedures and english language skills that should have precluded their flying alone. Due to these limitations; it took entirely too long and too many transmissions to accomplish basic radar identification and proper IFR flight plan read backs. These two aircraft required easily 20-30 transmissions each; if not more; causing a major and unnecessary disruption to the flow of services to other aircraft. While I endeavor to assist every pilot as best I can; pilots with the negligible level of skill these two displayed tested my patience to the maximum and caused an enormous distraction; potentially detrimental to the safety of the rest of the aircraft under my jurisdiction. Recommendation; the instructors ...and the flight school should be sternly warned that the performance of their students must be in conformance with fars and FAA expectations for competence and intelligible speech. For the record; the gainesville/ocala area in the jax airspace is constantly bombarded with difficult to understand pilots but these two were significantly worse than the worst I've worked to date. Shortly after these two aircraft exited my airspace; a third aircraft from this same flight school picked up an IFR from ZJX prior to entering jax airspace. While the flight plan aspects of the third aircraft were not as problematic as the first two; the third also had an unacceptable level of english language skill and should not have been permitted to solo the aircraft based on the inability to communicate properly.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: JAX TRACON Controller described a very work intensive event involving several aircraft requesting IFR handling that were being flown by pilots with minimal language skills; the reporter questioning the CFI and flight school training.

Narrative: Two consecutive aircraft; with departure flight plans filed for CTY in the ZJX airspace; entered JAX airspace VFR and requested to activate their IFR flight plans. Because the flight plans will not print at JAX until they are activated; I had no record of the flight plans and no way to find their codes without attempting to full route them in the NAS. I tagged the aircraft VFR and began looking for the IFR flight plans and discovered they were filed at CTY. I amended the departure airport to one in JAX airspace to generate the strips and issued IFR flight plans. These two aircraft were both being piloted by foreign nationals on cross country IFR solo flights with unacceptable understanding of IFR procedures and English language skills that should have precluded their flying alone. Due to these limitations; it took entirely too long and too many transmissions to accomplish basic RADAR identification and proper IFR flight plan read backs. These two aircraft required easily 20-30 transmissions each; if not more; causing a major and unnecessary disruption to the flow of services to other aircraft. While I endeavor to assist every pilot as best I can; pilots with the negligible level of skill these two displayed tested my patience to the maximum and caused an enormous distraction; potentially detrimental to the safety of the rest of the aircraft under my jurisdiction. Recommendation; the instructors ...and the flight school should be sternly warned that the performance of their students must be in conformance with FARs and FAA expectations for competence and intelligible speech. For the record; the Gainesville/Ocala area in the JAX airspace is constantly bombarded with difficult to understand pilots but these two were significantly worse than the worst I've worked to date. Shortly after these two aircraft exited my airspace; a third aircraft from this same flight school picked up an IFR from ZJX prior to entering JAX airspace. While the flight plan aspects of the third aircraft were not as problematic as the first two; the third also had an unacceptable level of English language skill and should not have been permitted to solo the aircraft based on the inability to communicate properly.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.