Originally Posted by
FullWings
Would it be impolite to say “Whoosh”?
Apologies - I was referring to the posts suggesting implementing EICAS on the 737 would be cheap and easy - which is very much not the case. I'd (apparently erroneously) lumped you in with that crowd.
Originally Posted by
FullWings
My original comment was about having EICAS making the aircraft so different that current 737 pilots couldn’t fly it, which I thought through historical precedent and personal experience wasn’t necessarily a foregone conclusion?
Common type rating - even with 'differences' training - is a very sensitive subject. Worse, it's largely subjective - there are few hard and fast rules - so it's very difficult to predict what the regulators will do. The 757 and 767 have shared a common type rating for 40 years (and actually share a common flight deck), but we spent a
lot of time on pins and needles because no one wanted to be the one that implemented a change on one or the other that caused the regulators to decide they'd become too different and could no longer have a common type rating. We were working on implementing autostart on the 767 (mainly for the CF6-80C2 FADEC) in the early 1990's. Upper management killed it due mainly to the potential impact on the 757/767 common type rating, afraid it might be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back (much to my relief as there were some nasty technical issues we'd need to deal with to implement it on the 767)