Those of you who have english as your first language, do you clearly understand everything they say? Goddammit, I was barely able to understand the number 1999 for the first flight mentioned in the article...
Even native English speakers have trouble understanding ATC comms. The sound quality is poor and it's a very specialized vocabulary. But with practice it becomes much eaier because there is a very limited repertoire of things that the controller is likely to say, and once you know what those are it becomes a lot easier to decipher.
