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Old 10th Aug 2023, 05:21
  #17 (permalink)  
Uplinker
 
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: UK
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Ironically, my trusty electronic copy of the Airbus FCOM has just started playing up, so I cannot access the reference or diagram you cite.

But the text passage you quote is quite understandable to me: the Bleed air system has high and low pressure sources from each engine, which are selected by valves controlled by the FADEC, according to bleed demand; and are also managed to promote engine stability. This, coupled with your ATPL studies of gas turbine engines, should complete a reasonable picture of how and why the system operates the way it does. And why the bleed page shows alternative bleed sources from each engine.

It is a bit wordy, possibly, and could be more "slick" in terms of English, (and there is one single, minor typo). But I really don't think it is too bad. It explains everything pretty clearly to me.You will have to accept a certain 'awkwardness', owing to the translations from French, which has a sentence structure with elements in a different order to that of English.

You don't need to know the details to operate the aircraft or deal with a bleed failure, but the information helps, and gives you the reason for the detail in the engine bleed schematic. It also explains why in some bleed valve or bleed valve control failures, (e.g. FADEC); thrust changes must be made gently and slowly.

"station" is a way of describing part of an engine that has a series of stages of incrementally increasing pressure for example.

Perhaps the 'engineer speak' style is unfamiliar to you, but I would embrace it and enjoy learning. Certainly don't stress about it. You are never going to be asked specifically which stages/stations the bleed valves are located, you just need to know that there are bleed valves at high pressure and low pressure stations/stages of the engine, which are managed by the FADEC to satisfy bleed demand and compressor stability.


Edit to add: It occurs to me that my original Airbus FBW A320 type rating course, (all those years ago), and the subsequent A330 course, were taught in a classroom over several weeks, and we each had our own big 2" thick paper FCOMs. These huge paper copies might well have made it easier to assimilate the information, and mark pages and annotate or highlight text etc, than only ever being able to see one page at a time on an iPad. That might well be the problem here. Perhaps you can find a paper FCOM?
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