Communication Noise Means

Communication noise means it can influence the way that how people interpret ideas or information from others. And the forms of communication noise include psychological noise, physical noise and semantic noise. So, we can see that those noises seriously affect the communication between the crew members and the ground controllers in this case.

Physical

The environmental noises such as music, traffic or children playing can distract a listener to fully focus on a conservation. For example, the crew members requested land priority to the controllers, but many other flights also required to land at the same time. So, when the crew member was calculating how much fuel left, the controller was distracted by other requirements and forgot to put the Avianca flight in the priority.

Semantic noise

Language barriers

First, the crew members and the controllers are working from different understandings such as the different primary languages. The pilot was highly experienced and he drove the flight to New York several times before. However, he only depended his copilot to communicate with the air traffic controllers and he asked his copilot to interpret the meaning of" minimum lows-up altitude because his English was poor .The reason is that the crew members in Avianca are Columbians who speak Spanish and the air traffic controllers are Americans who speak English, so it leaded to a language barrier .

Cultural barriers

Secondly, the flight was not given instant priority to land because the copilot kept using "running low on fuel" to describe the problem of the flight until the flight crashed instead of using " fuel emergency" which is the standard aviation terminology.  And Because " running low on fuel" means an emergency in Spanish, so the cultural barriers hinder the air traffic controllers to entirely understand the situation of the flight.

Thirdly, high power distance display between crew members and air traffic controllers. And this affects the way that information flows up and down the hierarchy. We can see that the flight continued to circulate and wait the clearance to land , though the aircraft was almost out of fuel because the air traffic controllers have more power than the crew members, so they must follow all the instructions from them.