Taxi Shorthand

My first time dealing with South Ground at LAX on day 1 of IOE was an adventure. It’s a crowded frequency with some new instructions that I wasn’t expecting. An underrated skill at big airports is quickly, yet accurately, writing down, reading back, and understanding complex taxi instructions. I developed my own technique through trial and error to speed things up, and thought I'd share those with the community.

Start by looking at the taxi chart for the airport you’re going to and trying to figure out the general pattern of naming. Take LAX as an example:

LAX has a logical organization to taxiway names

From south to north, the parallel taxiways are Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Echo. Hotel is an oddball between the runways. Offshoots are labeled with numbers that increase westward as they come off the primary parallel, e.g. Bravo 1 from Bravo, etc. Higher letters are longer taxiways that go north-south and typically continue across a runway, with later letters in the alphabet further west. Knowing just this, I could throw “Where’s Charlie 18” at you, and you’d have a good guess at its general whereabouts without checking the chart first.

Brief what you think you’re likely to get so that you’re primed (but not too eagerly filled with expectation bias). If you’re new somewhere, try to get local knowledge before you go. In our example, LAX likes to give you double back instructions like “Bravo, Juliet, double back Charlie” if your gate is blocked. That confused me the first time. Next, sketch a bunch of horizontal rows on your scribble pad before you call for taxi, optionally with columns to demarcate the destination, route, and hold short:

Finally, call up and ask for taxi. Usually, they give you your destination at the beginning of the transmission, then a route, and other instructions, e.g. “Taxi 25R via Bravo, give way to American, hold short Charlie 4.” I write those down in that order with a shorthand for instructions like so:

If I don’t yet fully understand it, I’ll review with the other pilot and sometimes sketch it on the taxi chart to make sure we both get it.
Approaching C4, they give us “Follow the American Eagle from Charlie 4, continue via Bravo, monitor tower.” That instruction goes in the next row, and so forth.
Here are some shorthands I like to use to reduce writing and readback times:

• Taxiways are capitalized with spaces (useful in places like IAH where they have double letters).
• Instructions are lowercase (e.g. “f” is follow,” “gw” is “give way,” “t” is “tower,” etc.).
• Airline names are right behind the instruction (“gwAA” means “give way to American”).
• I use a minus sign for hold shorts (e.g. “-C4”) to remind myself that we’re not getting that yet.
  
• I use a plus sign for crossing (e.g. “+25R”) to disambiguate from taxiway X-ray.

Here’s a real-life scribble pad from LAX:

Scribble pad taxi instructions at LAX. Fortunately, I'm the only one who had to decipher my own handwriting at the time....

They sent us the long way around to 24L via the north route with a couple stops, then had a gap and jumped us in line and launched us from Echo 8. No idea why #1 wasn’t ready, but we had numbers for it, so we got out.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of shorthands, but I hope it helps you when you go to busy airports. Please get in touch if you’ve got other techniques you’d like me to reference.