Originally Posted by
Alpine Flyer
Would you be able to elaborate a bit on that? (My A310 experience is limited to a few jumpseat rides.)
It was a three man aircraft but the FE had been made redundant and replaced with ecam. The problem with the ecam was that the only way to update it was to replace the memory chips rather than update the software.This never happened and the QRH ended up a a very large document. Electrical failures would start off on ecam and then the bus would fail and you then had to try and find where you had got to in the QRH. Some failures required the use of the bus isolation switches but if action on them didn’t stop the failure there was nothing to tell you to reverse the action and try the other one. The usual result was a very dark cockpit.
Avionics smoke warnings required the FO to sniff the exhaust air from the Avionics bay. Airbus had not considered the long term health effects of sniffing modern plastics. Whilst the PM was trying to work out what had gone wrong the PF had to deal with an aircraft that had a huge amount of performance at low level and was very basic when it came to flying non-precision approaches. The R version had a number of system changes to allow it to fly etops but as they were bolt on they didn’t integrate with the systems very well.
The aircraft was incontinent and would leak hydraulic fluid often resulting in the loss of a system. Other regular failures included flaps and a fuel quantity system that was only an approximation at best. It was not unknown for a ton of fuel to disappear enroute in the plumbing, and it often never came back. All of the electronics was early 1980s vintage(think red led on displays) and wasn’t overly reliable especially after power changes.Every system seemed to have a manual back up in case the new kit gave up. This was very useful when you were nursing an abused twenty year old airframe around the world.
The manuals were as described above-French translated into English by a German. They were very comprehensive when first issued in the late 1980s , almost a how to build an A300 guide.
It was lovely aircraft to handfly though and would outclimb virtually anything.