Originally Posted by
iggy
............I'm not rated in Boeing but in other types that have moving thrust levers, and for the life of me I just can't see how not having to look away from the PFD to know what the engines are doing is not going to be benefitial in bad weather, particularly when the A/T in Airbus is sometimes slow and inacurate maintaining the speed. A slight push or retract of the thrust levers by the pilot would be enough to fix a situation where the A/T is not maintaining Vapp on final, whereas now the pilot can't do absolutely anything except wonder when the A/T is going to react.
And what makes a GA complicated is not a moving thrust lever, is having to push a button on the side of the lever after slamming GA thrust in a panic situation, something that is not required in Airbus.
Airbus system works fine but it could work so much better...
If you are finding that you are so transfixed to the PFD that you don't have the capacity to flick your eyes across to scan the N1/EPR gauges and back; then perhaps you need to go-around, or improve your capacity to scan.
And I see you agree with me about the well designed thrust control of the Airbus FBW.
As you say, the Airbus system does work extremely well, and will give Vapp +/- 5kts, but if it is not doing what you need, you should take manual control - indeed Airbus specify this action if the automatics are not performing correctly.
I find the Airbus FBW auto-thrust so good that I have only ever had to do this a couple of times on older A330s, which apparently did not have the increase in auto-thrust response gain below 3,000'.
We used to be allowed to use 'phase advance'; where a little push or pull on the thrust levers would correct a "slow" auto-thrust, but presumably too many pilots did not fully understand the sequence and cocked it up and got into difficulties, so it was withdrawn. But taking manual thrust control always remains an option, in which case the thrust levers are entirely conventional and do move to match the changes of demanded thrust, (because the pilot moves them !).
"slamming" the thrust levers to go-around does indeed sound like the actions of panic, rather than the calm, considered actions of a competent pilot. The clever part of the Airbus FBW system, as you know, is that simply and instinctively clicking the levers fully forward into TOGA, switches the engines, the aircraft and the navigation systems into go-around mode, without any other switch-pressing required to select go-around.
