Manual Thrust on A320's READ THIS! :)
I was just wondering whether operators of the Airbus A319/A320/A321 aircraft allow their pilots to fly the aircraft with manual thrust?
The reason I am asking is that I fly for a major UK based airline and we are currently allowed to fly with manual thrust if we desire for practicing manual flying during approaches.
However the plan is to ban the use of manual thrust and mandate autothrust. I have a number of concerns with this.
1) We will have "new" first officers coming into our airline having only flown Cessnas and Senecas and they will never have moved the thrust levels on the aircraft they fly, except in the simulator (which we all not is not 100% realistic) and when moving the levers from Idle to Flex and back to Climb and then from Climb to Idle.
2) There are MANY failures which lead to the loss of autothrust. So we will have flight crews that do not know anything about thrust lever position, power settings etc and then all of a sudden the autothrust fails and they are left wondering what to do with it?!
Also, any Airbus pilot will know that the autothrust is not the best in the world, it is often slow to repond and then adjusts too dramatically. This is not the smoothest way to fly manual approaches or visual approaches.
My view is that if the pilots are having problems flying with manual thrust, we should be training more use of manual thrust to get better at flying it! Its a pretty poor show if the pilot of a jet airliner cannot even set power settings manually whilst flying a fly-by-wire airliner that even takes care of all the trimming automatically for the pilot!
So therefore I am wondering if YOU fly an Airbus A320 series aircraft, does YOUR airline allow you to use manual thrust???????
Thanks.
David.