Originally Posted by
clark y
Throwing Occam’s razor out there, I wonder if this will be a case of runway confusion followed by heads buried in the box? Does a DHC8-400 have a magenta line?
IF this is the case, it is once again a wake up call to all of us that no matter what happens, flying the aircraft is our ultimate responsibility.
As dash 8 q400 driver, I think the same. On the paper the FMS of the dash is "quit" powerfull (Universal 1K). Nice colour, can do RNAV overlay vor or ndb approach with vertical profile, ... But the ergonomic of the system come from 40years ago (same page and logic as first universal 1 FMS).
Not always easy to set up, even more in a rush or if not really confident with how to do it, I won't be surprised if on the CVR, pilots tried to save all with the FMS ...
I don't know how was equipped with the plane, but I saw it was delivered to SAS in 2001, so probably the plane was equipped with only 1 FMS on cpt side, so if FO do set up, you need to go through the power levers and condition levers to the cpt side to do the FMS, really good to do "monitoring in the same time". If now the plane is equipped with 2 FMS ... Depending of the software version, the don t speak together (only last software allows them to share info), meaning does not change anything, the PM need to do the set up in the PF FMS then do what he did in his FMS ... And if now you think, the PM could do all in his FMS then the 2 pilot would have the source set to the PM FMS, so both pilots would see the same on their PFD and MFD ... Nop !!! You can only change the source of the PFD, on the MFD, cpt side will be always showing FMS1 and FO side FMS 2 ... I don't know how the engineers of bombardier managed to come with that but ...