wrong Blocktime registration?
 

Hi guys,

I've been reading some EU-OPS legislation and noticed something that is not correctly applied within my company. It's all about the following quote from EU-OPS:

I noticed that our Airbus A319 registrates the block time after the aircraft has reached its final park position (last parkingbrake-set before doors are opened). But the extra time in case we leave the engines running are not calculated towards blocktime.

(we try to keep the engines running in idle for 3 minutes after landing to increase it's livetime. For short-taxi times after landing, that sometimes means we still keep the engines running at the gate for maybe 1 - 2 minutes. Since we fly many short legs, this might add up to almost an hour per month..)

I can't believe that every Airbus in the world is incorrectly registrating it's blocktimes. So please provide me some feedback about this question...

- Is blocktime really until engines are switched off?
- Which definition is used in your company?
- How does your aircraft registrates blocktime?

I suspect that the industry and the legislators have concluded that something which even in the worst case can only amount to a dozen hours a year for an aircraft flying thousands of hours annually isn't worth bothering about.

Universally for ACARS I believe 'brakes on'. You should be able to over-ride the time via your company ops - good luck!!:rolleyes:

ACARS parameters can be programmed. We have different ones in our fleet, from brakes on, over less than 2kts groundspeed and engines shut off to brakes on and first door opened.

@DaveReidUK
We are substantially paid by the hour when in overtime. Furthermore we fly up to the EU-OPS limits in summer. Therefore correct registration will have effect on these two items. But nevertheless, any company should obey the official legislation, even if it's just a minute.

@BOAC
We can override the times, or adjust them by an extra application of the Parking Brake just before the doors are opened. But in 99% we just let ACARS do the automatic registration of our Blocktimes.

@Denti
I wonder why a sophisticated Airbus has false-programmed ACARS-time-registration? Is my company able to re-program the software for correct blocktime registration??

Cant really say how it is done on the bus, on our 737s the ACARS part of the FMC is a user programmed software, ie. the company can and frequently does reprogram it, at least parts of it like the electronic journey log which includes automatic time logging.