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Old 25th Apr 2008, 20:07
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jettison valve
 
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Europe
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airbus eng,

On request from FR-HiTemp (many moons ago!), we evaluated an A340-600 pump; I think they called it Mk100 at that time.
After only 2.000FH or so it showed serious signs of cavitation so that a mandatory hard time was on the table; thankfully, that never happened.

In the frame of this excercise, FRH asked us to remove our high-time main pump of the in-service design (Mk1 to Mk4 - canīt remember the exact type) for comparison. Based on our computer systems and the a/c delivery documents, I found a pump that had accumulated around 20.000FHs in a main position. I witnessed the teardown in Titchfield - and, wow, FRH gave me a hard time that I had sent them a young pump (they thought)! I almost had to swear that indeed the pump had served many, many hours pumping fuel.
Sometime during the teardown, their engineers found marks of corrosion at the impeller, convincing them about the true age of the pump. I was saved!

So, to the best of my knowledge:
No scheduled removal of the engine feed / xfer / APU pumps on the A330/A340. The reliability of the FRH pump is really good (GEC-Marconi heritage, if am not wrong) - a lot better designed than the B747 crap!

One more piece of information: The A330 standby pump outboard of the collector cell may rot down standing in a water puddle... Keep an eye on it, as you will not notice its failure under "normal operating conditions"!

Cheers,
J.V.
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