Airbus Managed Nav Approaches
 

A few years back, our company banned Managed Nav Approaches on Airbus Fleet as it was explained that Airbus moved the onus onto the operators to validate each and every approach including updates in the Nav data base (online I believe).

As a result, only Selected Approach is available for Non Precision Approaches as it is unpractical to use Managed Approach with the imposed limitations.

Have other companies also banned Managed Approach for this reason, or has loop hole been found?

It depends; if you are gps equiped u are allow to perform non precision approach with manage mode BUT only for the lateral and selected for vertical.

If u are irs equiped it is selected for both

Robin, our company does allow fully manged approaches on the Airbus fleet subject to the verification of database, and a list is published for each nav database cycle. The current notice permits us to perform managed approach (gps and non-gps aircraft) at just 8 airfields, of which Malta is one :ok:

We are allowed to do them in bmi but not if we doing the approach "in anger", which means for me that it must basically be a visual approach. The database has not been verified yet and it doesn't seem likely that it will be in future. I wish they would get on with it thought, it's like flying an ILS, very stable and smooth.

Folks,

Just for an interested amateur, can you explain what 'selected' and 'managed' approaches are? I know that an ILS approach can be flown either manually or automatically, but how do these other options differ? Are they using different navigation information other than ILS signals?

Thanks.

We can do them in most places (fully managed)- subject to verifying final approach track, distances, crossing alts and angle from the box agree with the Jepp within strict tolerances.... It helps that we are GPS primary 99.999% of the time.

Obviously a localizer approach is selected vertically, once the loc is captured.

A selected approach is one where the pilots flying makes inputs to the autopilot (that is actually flying) and managed is where the autopilot takes it's commands from the flight management and guidance system.

RZ
We've been allowed to managed non-precision approaches for the last 9 years or so,even when the a/c didn't have GPS.

In fact I've seen more duff managed approaches using GPS in a non WGS84 environment (China) than ever before when all we did is check that we were in 'high' accuracy!

The validation of the approach came about because there were some approaches that had a level segment (FPA =0 deg). sometimes this would be shown in the FMGS as 0deg and sometimes there is no glide angle but the system tries to fly level. In the latter case the FPA is not 3 deg or whatever. In our database this means a few approaches are banned fom being flown.