I spend most of my life flying the Barbie in and out of CWL and agree totally with Javalin. A constant descent clearance makes life a lot easier but a constant rate of descent is not really that practical cos of the slowing down thing. As an extra bit of Info the Barbie has a climb and descent mode called Flight Level Change (FLC). It's company SOP that this be used in the climb and more importantly in the descent. FLC commmands a descent rate of 2000ft/min which leads to the descent points commanded by the FMS (set up assuming use of FLC in descent - barbie FMS has only a vertical profile but no physical control over that profile vertical profile all down to crew) being further out than you might expect. If needs be - which it nearly always is coming into Cardiff you can revert to VS or Speed modes to increase that rate of descent. But as Javalin rightly says at some point you have to check that rate of descent to slow down.
FLC handles this by automatically starting to reduce the rate of descent back to 1000ft/min between 120 and 100 to reduce speed to 250 knots by 100. Although with no auto thrust the good old pilot has a role to play as well by selecting flight idle at FL120. After that can descend again up to 3000ft/min if needs be and not too worried about scaring the pax !
To answer your question this puts the barbies descent points for Cardiff at the levels we fly just before CPT when coming from the East, and BHD coming from the South and just after Monty coming from the North. Usually get kept high coming in from the East which is I suspect what your question relates to.
As far as going outside CAS is concerned fine as long as we have a RAS and can justify our actions at the subsequent board of enquiry.
Last edited by CheekyVisual; 9th Sep 2002 at 07:44.