A320. Securing the A/C. What to do with maintenance bus and ext. power?
 

Hi,

After the "securing the A/C" checklist is completed, I usually leave the plane with the external pwr connected to the a/c, cockpit powered up, if it is scheduled to depart again within the next few hours. I'll only switch the maint bus on and "remove" the gnd power when I know the a/c is not going anywhere soon.

Personally I don't like it when I come on board the A320 with the cockpit powered down, when I know it just got to the gate a bit earlier.

I often find new ecam warnings or glitches when I then power up the cockpit again by switching the ext pwr on (with the switch on the ovhd panel). Some of our a/c are older and they have this problem especially in cold weather. (And ever the newer ones have this! :cool: )

My company has nothing written down in the SOP's about this. In my previous company, I'm quite sure we had received a note from our tech department based on an Airbus recommendation to leave the ext pwr connected to the ship every time it's expected to fly again soon.

What's your experience? Anything in your company's SOP? Can anybody find me a reference to such a recommendation from Airbus?

Hi Sabenaboy,

I understand your point, in my 2 previous airlines I had the same issue, there was nothing officially written about that subject so you would find people leaving the aircraft in transit preparation, others switching everything off and so on. In my current airline we leave the airplane in transit preparation whenever a relatively short transit is expected or we secure it with a higher transit, which is quite logical I think.
I think I have some documents from Airbus somewhere or at least I used to... I'm going to have a look around the hard drives :ok:

When I started on the bus many years ago we had a note from Engineering explaining that some cockpit equipment was electrical cycle limited and switching to maint bus completed a cycle (CRT display units were a given example). We were told not to go to maint bus for less than 6 hours.