Capt Manuver said:
Lexxie747,
I heard about that one from pilots who were there, and there was another interesting one a few days later. MEA A330 from ACC-LOS that lost all navigation equipment and was all over the place. We were holding 1300ft above them yet we have to avoid them running into us. Luckily the wx was nice, but it still took the intervention of other aircraft around who gave them directions b4 they could find the runway and land in lagos. GPWS warnings could be heard in the background when they made atc transmissions.
What would make such high tech machines loose all ability to navigate, or is it the crew that have issues?
Hmmm, got to thinking about your post here Capt Manuver. What are the chances of two "clown" crews getting lost like "glorified bus driver" and his sock puppets want us to believe in the same week in the same area?
I don't know about the A330, but the A310 was notorious for 100 mile map shifts if you left it in auto update. Most 310 drivers did not know how to disable that function since it was weird and not published well by airbus, and so flight departments relied instead on the honeywell fms update load "blackballing" known erroneous third world nav ground stations. Damnedest design in the world to not verify that the ident was good like old pilots used to do before they would trust a station! But that's how Airbus designed the thing. I once had an 18nm map shift on approach into a mountainous region. After the auto-update and cross-talk, the map showed us subterranean (inside of mountains 3000 feet higher than us!)
Needless to say, Raw data rules down low in the terminal area!
The only way enroute to disable it from grabbing a bad station and hopelessly getting you lost if a commie DME station was trying to do that to you was to take both "VNI" switches to the "VOR" position and then manually clear out stations on the update page on the fms (and it wasn't responsive; and usually took several attempts.)
If you didn't do this, any manual update that you accomplished could be over-ridden by the commie station if you weren't careful. But this knowledge was only on one small table in the manual with no text accompanying it on our books.
The above are all just my opinions only.
pac