Originally Posted by
Occy
TopBunk, can you explain how it takes longer to pre-flight a larger aircraft?
Talking from my own experiences Occy, the walk around does take longer than a single aisle aircraft due to the size of the aircraft..............not a huge amount but it does eat into that 15 minutes extra. Where the extra time IS needed is on the flight deck. Routes that are flown every day on the short/mid haul network normally have a company generated route in the FMGS. This means the crew punch in, for example, ABC33 and the whole flight plan except for departure rwy and SID along with arrival rwy and STAR are auto generated. Entry of relevant rwy data takes a minute or so, but longhaul flights because of the daily changing NAT system and the possibility of random routes don't have this facility. After entering the city pairs you then have to join up all the dots from departure to arrival along with the rwy SID/STAR info. Once you have built up the flight plan and checked it you then have to manually enter the winds aloft and temperature at your cruise altitude along with winds at levels that may be part of a step climb later in the route. This is so the magic box can give you a best guess at flight time and fuel burn. For example if you start at F360 with a step climb to F380 and a final step to F400 you have to, (at my company at least), enter the data for all three levels. Try this one some time and see how long it takes........on the scratch pad enter260/30/400 and enter, then 270/40/380 enter, and then 280/50/400. Next type in -51/360 and enter in the temp field. Don't forget to enter the temp at the new cruise level at the step climb point Now enter all the wind and temp values for up to 20 waypoints (sometimes more sometimes less) and see the extra time melt away. Then manually enter lat/longs of ETP's and any other waypoints required. Once all this is done the whole Oceanic sector has to be checked so into true and read off tracks and distances from the flight plan as well as checking each all Oceanic waypoints and making sure the stored co-ords are correct. As well as all this good stuff going on you are checking the tech logs for aircraft status, ETOPS dispatch, RVSM, MNPS/RNP restrictions.
This is obviously achievable to a well trained crew but take into account the hassle of getting through security and just getting to your aircraft and sometimes the whole extra 15mins just ain't enough