One thing that is guaranteed to piss me off is the use of the word “aircrafts”. There is no such word in the English language, just like there are no “sheeps” – there is one sheep, two sheep and so on. It’s the same with the word aircraft, as I’ve written about before.
I would have expected that people in the aviation industry would get this right, however it appears I was wrong. I stumbled across a real clanger recently and so I decided to share.
Aircrafts Rears Its Ugly Head
You may have heard that SAS has introduced a new livery. Naturally they are pretty happy about that, as you would be. While meandering to the SAS web site to look at booking some flights, I was confronted by this horror.
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- My eyes are bleeding! Aircrafts! WHY!
All thoughts of celebrating the new colour scheme went out of the window when I saw this. In actual fact, I trundled right back to the British Airways web site and booked a Stockholm to Dublin flight with them instead of with SAS. I was that disgusted!
SAS Do Some Cute Things Online Though
What did make me go “aww” several weeks earlier when visiting the Scandinavian Airlines web site was their error screen. For some reason I managed to get it and got this for my troubles.
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- Now that’s pretty cute!
Saying the page is in “flight mode” amused me quite a bit, hence why I did a screen grab to share in a future article. I enjoy it when things that could be irritating are turned into something fun.
Overall Thoughts
It is pretty safe to say that I despise the word “aircrafts”. Call me a stickler for spelling and grammar, but as far as I am concerned, the evolution of English doesn’t include this word. What’s next, “hovercrafts” and “spacecrafts”? Horrific. Most people who make the error do have English as a second or third language, so I get it, but still.
By the way, I didn’t really switch to booking with British Airways because of SAS using this word. I’m not quite that much of a snowflake – there were other reasons that helped make that decision.
What say you good people of the Internet? Are you a person who whips out the word “aircrafts” to make me wince or do you know how to speak properly? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Are you kidding? With the horrendous grammar and syntax used everywhere today, you’re concerned about “sheeps”, I mean “sheep’s” … the apostrophe is always used with an s at the end of a word, right? Besides this point, I don’t think those people can read anyway.
Quite true, text speak and all the rest of it has certainly made things a lot worse than before. When I was in Primary School, I hated learning English. I found it really boring, yet all of that which was drummed into me tends to still be there today. I’d love to see how the syllabus has changed. Thanks for the comment!
Their marketing staffs not grammar checking again. Although their English is far better than my Danish/Swedish
Haha – they have amended it now, so that’s good. They had it right on the other pages linked off it, so I’m sure it was just a slip!
THANK YOU – someone finally called this idiocy out and just because its in common (emphasis on common) use doesnt make it right
I agree. It was one of the first things we were told in our aviation degree, that the word “aircrafts” doesn’t exist. Considering it was mostly foreign students, who can be easily forgiven since there aren’t that many words with the same singular and plural, I was pleased to hear it. Thanks for the comment!
you need a comma to differentiate these two independent clauses :
Are you a person who whips out the word “aircrafts” to make me wince ~~~,~~~ or do you know how to speak properly?
I knew there’d be someone who’d pick me up on things. Far be it for me to cast the first stone, I make mistakes with punctuation all the time. Thank you though, I always like being corrected!
In the 21st century if people understand it then it is a word. Old rules are as out of date as a DC-8
Of course people will understand it, that goes without saying. It doesn’t make it right, though! Thanks for the comment!
I could see it if the apostrophe was just missing, as in “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. You may have noticed the aircrafts engines are both on fire while we are hours from the nearest land.”.
Hahaha – what an example! But yes, I see your point there, I can see it there too. Thanks for that!