Heads up!
 

Just to put everyone in the picture, Winnie has been posting for some time over in the D&G forums, much to everyone's amusement. If you do a search for his posts in those forums you will get the picture pretty quickly.:=

Jesus Winstun, you are one brave hombre. What fantastic airmanship you must posses. Hopefully that same airmanship will keep you honest enough to tell us all about your next stuff up so we can all learn from it.:rolleyes:

Just thought I'd fire this shot across the bows as a wake up call:

There are quite a few bona-fide, self absorbed, blowhards with a British, Australian or Kiwi accent lurking on PPRuNe mixed with the obligatory, awestruck wannabes. There are also quite few awestruck wannabes masquerading as self absorbed blowhards with a British, Australian or Kiwi accent.

The above observation was made by a visitor to PPRuNe and I thought it very pertinent. This thread is turning into one of those classical examples where we all need to sit back and analyse the posts and decide who knows what they are talking about and who only thinks they know what they are talking about. I may even make that the PPRuNe motto! :hmm:

Blasted colonials - not spiffing cricket, is it!
Eh what.

On lord is hard to be humble.....
 

Hey Witsun, only one joker on this forum.

It blokes like u that make aviation the ministry of self importance.

Factors like stress and fear do play a big part in emergencies but I guess a Mr. Perfect plonker like you would be imune to such human emotions.

We aint robots and even you must have have cocked up at some point in your perfect career.

Coop & human bear.

PS just looked at Witsun's profile. Under location. It says "planit"

But doesn't say which one he comes from.

Coop

Hauling thread sluggishly back on topic...

Have heard rumour that Airbus has now changed the A330 FMGS so that it does now calculate fuel remaining against what it's been burning and what was loaded and so can alert low fuel irrespective of manual checks.

If true, this is, no doubt, just another product improvement and unrelated to any incidents past present or future.

And do Pigs Fly! :mad: Like hell it wasn't related. Horse, bolt and stable door come to mind!

Well said Sooty!

it just goes to show what kind of solidarity pilots display...
no wonder our profession is in "dire straits"!

Frangible! that's a good one...;) like u say I'm sure it has no relation whatsoever to the incident at cause, or all others BTW

Love is blind and so are some people.
 

To: Frangible

This change is as a direct result of the Air Transat incident and closely follows an AD issued by Airbus changing the directions in the operating manual relative to managing a leak or suspected leak. It was in this AD that Airbus stated that it was the pilots’ fault.

Note to all: As for UK transmission of the Mayday program, we (Discovery Canada) know that three programs will be broadcast in
November and three in January at 8pm on Mondays on Channel Five. But,
unfortunately we do not yet know which order the programs are being
transmitted.

:E

Not sure if I missed the schedule in the many posts here but just in case, the MAYDAY program "Flying on Empty" is planned to air on the Discovery Canada channel on

October 8 @ 2200
October 9 @ 1700
October 12 @ 2200

All times Eastern, and it will be in English.

OzPax1 and Lu,

I think Frangible and Gumbi were being more than slightly sarcastic.

Thanks IFT. Irony can be dangerous...

Frangible,

You are quite right - irony in the wrong hands is extremely dangerous. In retrospect, I should have used 'ironic' rather than 'sarcastic' in my message (it had been a long day!).

I see that 'irony' is defined as being more subtle than 'sarcasm'. In this case it might have been too subtle;)

FU/FOB Disagree
 

Just for info:
The Fuel Used/FOB disagree message is calculated by the FCMC and is contained in FCMC9.0 and above. A FWC change is required in parallel to 'activate' the warning.
This is active on all new deliveries and Service Bulletins are available to apply the change retrospectively.
The Fuel Used/FOB disagree occurs when there is over 5t mismatch between the departure fuel minus fuel used, and the FOB figure.

This warning was conceived about 6 years ago, as an A340 operator and an A320 operator both lost significant amounts of fuel from the engine HP fuel filter cover which came off due to the helicoil inserts in the housing giving away. The A340 lost about 20 tonnes of fuel (xfeed valves were not opened), the A320 lost a lot more because the pilot did exactly as per the Air Transat pilot and opened crossfeed. The A320 landed with something like 200kg FOB.

There was resistance in some of the operators contacted (including the two operators, A320 and A340 cases above). The resistance was due to the fact that the Flight Ops departments considered en-route fuel checks to be basic airmanship, and they were concerned that the existance of such a warning could cause complacency.

Airbus eventually decided to inplement the function, as it was considered that it was beneficial to alert crew as soon as the threshold is exceeded. In theory if the leak is from one wing tank or engine, the fuel imbalance message should come first (in most cases).
There was one case about 9 years ago when an A330 had an excessive transfer to the trim tank due to a leaking vent, a pipe disconnected in the trim and pushed about 5 tonnes overboard (trim transfer continued as the tank was not reaching the trim tank fuel quantity requried for the aft CG target). This problem was due to incorrect pipe installation.

I think the FU/FOB Disagree function is a good thing, but hopefully it will be the last defense.

Hers an interesting fact for you all,

Years ago my airline had to ground it's entire fleet of b757 a/c (only 19 a/c but hell, still *ucks your day in ops) for inspection, after a fault was found with one of the clips that 'restrain'(sic) the fuel line and an AD was issued.

Guess what engine our 757's our equipped with?

A clue?
can't say Derby 'cos GE engines are also made there. but you get the point!

Makes me wonder if the MX organisation was up to speed.

Plastique,

my papers quote a discrepancy threshold of 3.5t for the FU/FOB warning.

Given the number of scenarios in which this warning is inhibited and the fact that monitoring fuel consumption is one of the primary duties of a flight crew en route, I somehow doubt whether this feature is really worth its money.

BTW: The modification consists of a pin programming between FCMCs (9 and on) and FWCs (8 and higher, if I remember right).

Happy Landings,
J.V.

Well, I've just seen "Flying on Empty" on Discovery Canada. A fairly typical Discovery production - about 10 minutes of facts strung out to an hour's show by some speculative and not very well done re-construction of events on-board, although it looks like they borrowed a simulator. Whose, I wonder, since Air Transat declined to participate in the filming.

Nothing new in the facts that hasn't already been raised in this thread, but the highlight for me was seeing a real live Ppruner - Lu Zuckerman :D

Lu, were those your model aircraft in the background?

I'm waiting for my Juno nomination.
 

To: India Four Two

Yes but they represented less 1/20th of the total collection. If you are ever in the are in the area you are welcome to come for a visit and see all of the models.

:E

Hi Lu. That's a great model collection Are they all from from kits, or are they manufacturers models? :cool:

Couple of quick comments:
Why oh why didn't they get the f:mad: g radio terminology correct? If the producers cannot get that simple fact right, it doesn't say dick for the rest of the research that went into the program.
I didn't see that they'd closed the x-feed after the loss of the first engine. Loss of an engine is a pretty good indication that your fuel problem is something other than a computer glitch.

That being said, after their balls were in the crack they pulled off a pretty fine piece of airmanship.

Lu,

I can see it now - "The Juno for the best aircraft model collection goes to ..... ":D

Thanks for the invitation - I'll have to see if I can manage a trip Down East some time.


PB,

I agree - the radio terminology made me cringe - they couldn't even get the calling and receiving callsigns in the correct order!