Words similar to take-off
Example sentences for: take-off
How can you use “take-off” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:
571 ("Briefing passengers before take-off") and No.
On March 27, 1977, the pilot of a KLM 747 radioed We are now at take-off, as his plane began rolling down the runway in Tenerife, the Canary Islands.
The Spanish-speaking controller had no clue that this was going on and so interpreted the at in the most natural way, as indicating a place, the take-off point.
The air traffic controller mistakenly took this statement to mean that the plane was at the take-off point, waiting for further instructions, and so did not warn the pilot that another plane, a Pan Am 747 that was invisible in the thick fog, was already on the runway.
The KLM pilot's otherwise perplexing use of the very nonstandard phrase at take-off, rather than the more standard phrase taking off, appears to have been a subtle form of what linguists call code-switching, a process in which bilingual or multilingual speakers inadvertently switch back and forth from one of their languages to another in the course of a conversation.