PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Air Asia Indonesia Lost Contact from Surabaya to Singapore
Old 29th Dec 2014, 00:50
  #256 (permalink)  
USMCProbe
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: china
Age: 61
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The radar installed on 320 series has an "AUTO" setting that is used almost universally by the Asian pilots I have flown with. I have flown with Vietnamese, Chinese, PI, Thai, Korean, Indonesian, and Malaysian pilots. Every one of them used AUTO.

The problem is AUTO is not accurate a significant amount of time. Over flat terrain and water, maybe 80% accurate or a little higher. Over mountainous terrain maybe 50% or less. It will paint ground terrain as a Tstorm, and when it is doing that, it will not paint any actual weather as the return from the ground is vastly higher than that from any weather. The radar has turned its' gain down automatically because of the high returns from the ground.

Flying over Indonesia using AUTO, it would be very easy to fly right through a huge thunderstorm in an Airbus. I have seen it too many times.

My legacy carrier has a little sticker on the AUTO setting. The sticker says

"INOP"
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