Finally, as stated in the TSB report,
"For a flight in FPA guidance mode, Air Canada’s practice was that, once the aircraft was past the FAF, the flight crews were not required to monitor the aircraft’s altitude and distance from the threshold, nor to make any adjustments to the FPA."
At Air Canada, the use of the distance/altitude table on the Jeppesen chart as a monitoring tool is not cited during pilot training for LOC/non-precision approaches"
What is Airbus recommended procedure regarding this? I've only flown Boeing, and a whole mess of other a/c, and I would never fly an NPA without using all the help I could get. Not monitoring ALT v DME was used in the 'dive & drive' type profile of ages gone by. Using FPA only would be like, in a less sophisticated a/c, setting a V/S at FAF and starting the watch and hoping. Why would you do that when you could make it safer monitoring ALT v DME? I'm curious if there are other Flt Ops who advocate that NPA technique and how that SOP can be approved the the CAA? There has to be a risk involved and this day of TEM why introduce any risk, especially when the statistics for CFIT show NPA's are the riskiest approaches. It doesn't seem common sense. I know what I'd do on such an approach. SOP does not say you are NOT allowed to use the ALT vDME table.
And, was it not reported some months ago that AC was making a claim against AirBus that the FPA system did not bring the a/c to the threshold as advertised? What happened about that? Surely the TSB report would have to investigate if the crew flew the profile according to Airbus procedures including any aspect of temp corrections and entries into MCDU.
Last Wx report was;
"wind 340°T at 22 knots, with gusts at 28 knots, visibility ¾ sm in light snow and drifting snow, broken cloud at 700 feet AGL, overcast cloud at 1000 feet AGL, temperature −6 °C, dew point −6 °C, and altimeter 29.62 in. Hg."
They were busy with that kind of weather..
So I doubt they would have been cross checking DME versus altitude inside the FAF, but that is speculation on my part.
If the automatics were in control of the a/c what would make them busy? Are you suggesting that in calmer weather they would have had time to do so even though it was not an SOP?