B737NG FANS 1/A - upgrade to be Europe compliant
 

I’m way out of my depth; looking for advice please.

We operate a private, US-registered B737NG & spend a lot of time in Europe. The aircraft and crew are certified and equipped for FANS 1/A operations.

In Europe we can only log onto Maastricht (EDYY) and London (EGTT) plus the NAT control centres. As of 24 August ‘21 we’re going to lose the ability to be able to log onto Maastricht.

Our FMS is 13.0 and we’re upgrading to 14.1 in the next month.

Can someone please give some guidance as to what we need to do, in terms of hardware or software to be able to access and log-on to all the European control centres using CPDLC?

Forgive my ignorance please.

Well, I am not an expert but I understand your predicament. My operator has been working on this issue for years. The sheer stupidity of a different communications protocol for Europe vs rest of the world is astounding.
I suspect you will need a separate datalink box for Europe on a 737. But I will happily stand corrected.

As there are quite a few 737NGs operating in Europe there seems to be a certified and whitelisted ATN B1 avionics suite for that aircraft type, using up to date VDL 2 communications. Ask your maintenance provider about that. However, as a GA airplane a private 737 should be exempted from the datalink mandate anyway.

There I was, thinking we had a monopoly on doing things differently.

I sincerely appreciate the responses until now. I’m hoping for some advice I can follow. All of Ryanair’s fleet have this extended capability so it can’t be expensive.

We are exempt but it would be really cool if we could use the system rather than losing the capability.

According to this page, FMC U14 brings capability for both FANS and ATN to be simultaneously used on the B737.

Brilliant FlyingStone! Thank you so much - this is exactly what I was looking for. We’ll see what U 14.1 provides us and understand that we may still require a CMU (we definitely have one of these) with an ATN Router (not so sure of this).

I’ll update for interest and sincerely appreciate your collective advice.

Dear ocencrosser,

FANS 1/A lacks both,

- the required integrity (10 -6), and
- the required latency for high density European airspace!

At the time the ATN mandate was selected, FANS 1/A was dismantled in the US (for good),
(and only restarted more than a decade later.)

Still today it is only operational in 2 or 3 centers and lacks major parts of ATN functionality,
Check stuck mic, just being one of them.

The 2 different DL standards are unfortunate, but originally satisfied very different requirements:
primary COM in low density airspace vs. Secondary COM in high density with VHF coverage.

cheers.

I would have thought Collins or whoever you are contracted with would be in a far better position to help you than folks on PPRuNe?