How do you read Airbus manuals?
 

Hello,

Maybe this is a strange question but I am a bit lost. All manuals I have downloaded from internet like A320 FCTM or FCOM have repeating pages for different MSN or MODS. What drives me crazy is two or tree paragraphs where all the information is 99% the same with some minor change between the pages that it's almost impossible to spot!
Why they just don't add differences and the end of paragraph? Boeing manuals seems to much more easy to understand.
Those manuals have thousand of pages and airline has just couple of planes. If someone of you is flying for a bigger airline do you have manuals with 100.000 or more pages with every page repeated for particular MSN?

Yes! Unless you have a version on ipad or similar. Try looking for a filter that gives you just one MSN number. The frustrating thing with paper manuals is that when an aircraft changes on your fleet, the whole manual gets amended for the change of MSN number.

Welcome to the "Airbus philosophy". The French don't even know how to number pages. They number them often with letters. But unfortunately they have not realized there is only so many letters in alphabet as opposed to numbers. I have been on airbus for 8 years and the manuals are getting worse and worse. Many mistakes in them too. Yes in our company we have many MSN numbers, but it get easier if you use electronic FCOM. I also agree that Boeing manuals are much better and more common sense.
It is unfortunate. Airbus is a great aircraft. But the manuals and the training department is a different story. They should subcontract all that to the Americans (by the way I am from Europe).

They are written by lawyers, for lawyers. They are not written for pilots.

As for Airbus training; its a problem. Thats why they keep crashing.

That, jonty, is the stupidest remark I have seen on this thread. Stick to flying your wheelie bin, you do not need qualifications for that.

Turbavykas, my company has a massive amount of difference among our fleet, to the extent that we have 4 or 5 variations for each section of the FCOM. The best way to read through them is to select one MSN/Tail-Number and use that aircraft as the "Default" version so to speak. Study that aircraft alone, don't worry about the rest.

Ask your company which aircraft you will be doing your sim on, i.e. which type and variation the sim is setup to replicate and then study that aircraft exclusively. When you get to line training study the difference between that aircraft and the aircraft you are going to fly. There is little chance that you are going to be able to study all the variations at the beginning of training, so chose one and stick with it.

It is not a safe doing to have on board an aircraft a piece of manual ( QRH or whatsoever ) where abnormal and emergency procedures for different MSN's are contained in the same book , whether electronic or hard copy, it certainly contributes to confusion and an uncertain mind set is the last thing you want during an emergency situation.

It would certainly help if they were written in English and not the ungrammatical and therefore often downright incorrect or misleading badly-translated-from -French-into-americanese-ish.

Why can't the bloody frogs get an English speaker to proofread them before publishing gobbledygook?

To be fair we are only 8 posts in, so give it time.

However, having spent the last 8 years flying these things, I stand by my comments.

The manuals are terrible, and the training worse.

When I first came to these aircraft, after many years on Boeings, the first words out of the instructors mouth was: "you cannot stall these aircraft, they will look after you".

This utter rubbish was from an approved TRTO. That attitude, I believe, has lead to the deaths of a significant number of people.

On-board manuals are aircraft specific

I can assure you that on board manuals are not MSN specific in many airlines; including majors.

Well, I'm glad we were able to clear that up.

In this modern day of LPCs they are. Select your Tail number and you won't have to go scrawling through sections that don't pertain to your aircraft.

QRHs are MSN specific or maybe it depends on the operator.

That would require an admission that the standard of English as taught in schools and numerous sponsored programmes was less than perfect and may result in a loss of credibility. :eek:

If ever one of those "lost in translation" manuals results in you making an unplanned landing in central France, please beware of the crocodiles and galloping Louis X armchairs. The dead body on the lawn is benign, though.:8

Let me get this straight. One guy says he dowloads stuff off the internet.
And then a whole bunch of pilots starts discussing it.

So, we don`t go to an airline and they feed you with the correct FCOMS and such . . .? You just go onto the internet and there is what you need to effectively operate the 320.

So, tell me you are all simmers or at least please give me the link for the FCOM downloads.

We ARE talking real world here? Maybe I should wake up.

Have I missed something here?

I thought the same thing. :suspect:

Or is there an approved source of manuals to download? :confused:

Time for a comment.

(a) caveat - I don't have any background on the Airbus so I am only able to talk generically.

(b) document provenance is extremely important - the internet is a useful place .. but has a lot of garbage interspersed amongst the useful stuff .. are these manuals purported to be downloaded traceable back to the OEM or not ?

(c) copyright is a consideration of note. Take care lest the OEM smite thee via legal sanction. The OEMs charge a hefty price for manuals so there is a real risk that the OEM may pursue folk who do the wrong thing.

(d) most civil manuals cover a range of serials and it takes some care to sort the wheat from the chaff when using them. Just part of the routine workload in the Industry.

(e) tailoring a generic manual to specific serials is not difficult - just a matter of dollars

(f) avoiding confusion is why the militaries tend to prefer tailored manuals

I can think of one paragraph in an fcom from Airbus that is so badly written that it took a quite unpleasant incident to show that what had been written was very far from the truth.

I can only hope that recent Airbus manuals have improved - from a maintenance engineers point of view the early manuals were the worst it has been my misfortune to work with. Both maintenance manuals and IPC were extremely difficult to comprehend - in some cases Airbus seemed to invent descriptive words as nobody knew what the hell they meant. It seemed to me that some terms were literal translations of the French but had no real meaning in English.

Airbus World