Originally Posted by
Check Airman
Why do you have to wait for the PM to set the FCU? If ATC gives you a vector, can’t you execute it while waiting for the PM to catch up? Why not just turn off the FD?
Another great time to just turn the FD off, as it increases workload.
I don’t fly a Boeing, but I’m on the other side of the Atlantic. First of all, there’s a lot less chatter in the cockpit. Previous company read FMA’s. The other companies here don’t. The only FCU change that is spoken out loud here in the US is altitude. I don’t know of any company that reads out headings and speeds. In the same vein, I don’t know if any US company that says “check” or “checked” to every change. I’ve seen some videos on YouTube of European cockpits that are simply ridiculous. Everything’s “checked”.
Now I’ve learned that here, we’re probably more relaxed because language barriers aren’t really an issue. It seems your airline wants you to do a lot of talking to coordinate FCU changes. My simple solution would be to turn off the FD when flying manually.
Very interesting !
In order :
You could fly FD's off and act according to what should be done even if the PM does not have time to do or even hear the adjustment order, but now you're breaking another rule which is to not fly outside of targets.
With FD off, you have a heading bug that appears on the PFD. You can measure the required drift angle visually, but the advantage of this heading bug is to align heading on the bug, not at a slightly different value.. So there are two possibilities that could be used, depending on personal preference and circumstances, but airbus rules, in practise, imposes one possibility, because the other is very unpractical.
That's the very interesting part. During my MCC you had to call all white modes. Now at my airline, we have to call all white and blue modes. So imagine saying "thrust idle open descent alt blue glide slope blue three thousand blue heading 180 loc blue cat III dual AP1+2"...
Turning off the FD erases some of the necessary callouts but not all of them. And this would be another example of having to do differently than we would judge best appropriate just because of this little rule that the PF can't touch the FCU.
Originally Posted by
Check Airman
Increase in workload? If the PM can’t talk on the radio and manipulate the FCU at the same time, he/she may be in the wrong line of work.
In order to transmit correctly a message (like "set heading 350"), the receiver should be ready.
So you can't really order something while he's receiving or reading back a message, he might miss some parts.
In any case, I don't understand the root reason why you should order any FCU change.. To avoid even a third of a second of looking away from the PFD ?
Reducing PF workload does not seem a valid argument to me.
Originally Posted by
Fursty Ferret
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should...
Rotating a knob uses very little ressource, sometimes much less than listening the coms to know when the order will be correctly received, see previous quote.