Originally Posted by
WHBM
These two aircraft were both built in 1984 but sat for more than two years before Finnair/Kar-Air took them up. Finnair owned Kar-Air, and it was never quite apparent where the dividing line lay between them.
They were oddball aircraft, being fitted with a different flight deck where the engineer sat between and just behind the pilots, some sort of trial arrangement that didn't work out. By the time they were built the 2-crew A310 was well in operation, so not clear what Airbus were trying to do. They were underused at Finnair, and in 1998 came to Air Scandic in the UK, which as the name might hint seemed to have some Finnair background support. I seem to recall the CAA didn't like the flight deck arrangement at all, and they were flown by their old Finnair crews.
These particular A300s might have been a kind of halfway house between the regular 3-crew A300B4 and the later 2-crew A300-600. FFCC- Forward Facing Crew Compartment - comes to mind. I think Malaysian Airline System was an early customer for this variant.
EDIT: It was Garuda, not MAS.