[noirscape]

It's not related to Chinese in specific, but in civilian air traffic, the lingua franca is specifically English[0]. The reason for this is because other languages leave too much room for interpretation. One incident not mentioned in that page that's worth bringing up is Korean Air Flight 801; the crew recognized an issue with the instruments quite a bit before the crash, but because the flight crew essentially was too polite in notifying the captain of the issue, the captain instead asserted authority with incomplete information, leading to the plane crashing[1].

Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801

[_jss]

Malcolm Gladwell's description of that accident and amplification is simplistic and not very accurate. There were many errors made that caused that accident, including ATC failing to follow protocol.

English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.

[gwd]

But that's more psychological than linguistic: The Korean language could certainly express, "we're about to crash"; and a foreigner in that cockpit would certainly have found a way to be more direct. It's much easier to break social restrictions in another language.

[numpad0]

It's just that pilots have no capacity left to be fluent in every languages everywhere. You don't avoid ambiguity speaking in the second language in a critical situation, you just incur significant responsiveness plus bandwidth penalty.

There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.