Speculation on why he was so far from the runway
Let's talk for a minute about Moving Map. And please feel free to raise the bullshat flag if you disagree with any of this based on your Airbus flying experience. On the predecessor airplane: the A310/A300 series (which was the first successful glass airliner), it was known that events happened in the third world to get as much as an 18 mile Map shift after the procedure turn, which of course is not acceptable for safe commercial navigation and could be fatal at some airports.
I never liked the early Airbus glass philosophy that the IRU positions were updated automatically, by just checking with the honeywell database for "blackballed" nav stations, and then skewing the map solution like crazy based on a station that may not have all it's marbles together that day, for whatever reason.
In the old days, when pilots had yokes, and airliners did not "just fly themselves", it was a standing procedure to personally identify and continuously moniter the morse code of any station you intended to bet your life on. But the airbus birds violated this time-tested rule and didn't constantly verify that the stations morse code was on the air. Finding out that in the systems manual was a challenge: Discovering that Airbus didn't want you to disable this DME updates feature down low was a very sobering day for me. There was no off switch!
After a lot of research and experimentation I discovered the only way to disable updates on the A310/A300 (which could kill you down low if you believed the map's story of where the airport was) in the terminal area was to put both pilot's VNI switches to off and then manually disable updates on each FMC. And it didn't always do it either. You had to sit there after disabling it and stare for a few minutes at the FMC update page to see if the commie box was going to latch onto a station and start moving the map around. Can you easily disable VOR/DME updates on the A320's? Does it mix in GPS?
Shocking design, but pilots and airlines who didn't appreciated that hazard happily had religious faith that the airport location was always correct as displayed by the ND (Navigational Display's Moving Map). Could this have happened in this accident?
When two check airmen broke out at minimums staring into tall mountains where the airport was supposed to be according to the map, and then did a desperate close-call TOGA that made the certifying "Navigator" quit, we knew we had a serious problem.
But the in-house solution was just fly on raw data and then to blackball certain VOR's that were suspected along the route to have screwed up the Maps believed position. (It's true, there was a time when Airbus reps advocated not having any raw data, like in rose mode, displayed. Both guys were chastised to remain in Map and "Get the Airbus Religion" as they counseled me in no uncertain terms.) But what if the VOR I'm depending on flakes out on approach? It happened in Juno, Alaska and killed everybody on that Western Airlines flight. That's when many airlines started having one guy (usually the Second Officer) listen to the morse code all the way to the ground. If it flaked out, he was supposed to tell the crew to go around.
But Airbus won't tell you that because they replaced the S/O with ECAM, and now you're just supposed to have faith that the station DME will not skew you if a local fiddles with it, or the roof of the VOR shack starts leaking.
Hey, it can happen.
And depending on EGPWS to save you is folly. I've seen that system screaming "Terrain" when on high approach to new runways in Kula Lumpur that the database was incorrect on. On a tight circle to land in marginal weather you and I both know it can get iffy. And the Airbus temptation is to just look at the airport center on the map and hope you reacquire the threshold (being blissfully unaware that the damn thing is still updating map center to any DME it can acquire.)
Such a deadly set of temptations that FAA has placed no-circling restrictions on many airline's type ratings on the biggest iron.
Thoughts?
Crunch - out