The OEB reminder function is a FWC feature that has been around for a long time but not many airlines selected the option. A few years ago Airbus decided to then offer the feature to Airlines free of charge in order to facillitate Airbus' own issues with OEB management.
For those who don't know, for any OEBs that require a revised ECAM procedure or status messages, the OEB Reminder function, once activated by inserting the oeb specific reminder code printed on the OEB into the FWC, will overwrite the specific ECAM procedure(s) or status msgs(s) and replace them with an ECAM message that refers the crew to the paper OEB in the QRH. Sounds sweet in theory.
The feature is still Free of charge to purchase but most airlines still do not incorporate OEB reminders into their fleets because of the administration burden the airline maintenance departments have to absord. It's quite a rigmarole to activate the feature and then keep track of which mods are done on which fins and when. It's not easy to manage and from our perspective doesn't really make the pilot's any easier. We activated the feature on our Wide body busses but based on that experience decided not to on our narrow body busses.
The OEB/FWC management process is so convoluted and is so exposed to maintenance errors/process, you can never be sure your ECAM OEB reminder status actually matches the mod status of the aircraft.
Without the reminder function on our narrowbodies, we just do the OEB review at the start of each pairing and we're good. (we never remove the OEB until the OEB fix is accomplished on all fins - other carriers might do it differently) We just open the QRH to the table of contents for the OEBS, Identify the ones there that have the AFFECTS ECAM column checked off and then either confirm we already know it or review any new ones. OEBs don't change very often so it's a painless 20 second exercise and we have no intention of installing the OEB reminder to mess things up..
Last edited by nnc0; 19th Jan 2012 at 21:21.