TAP001: Intro and Airbus' Golden Rules for Pilots

Welcome to the first ever A320 Podcast. It's just a short version this week to introduce ourselves and give you an idea of what you can expect from us each week.

Find lots more information at www.A320podcast.com

We hope to help new and experienced pilots with studying and revising for type ratings, simulator checks or promotions. Tell as many colleagues and friends about us as possible so we can grow and create a worldwide community of great airbus pilots.

Show Notes

The Golden Rules for Pilots - FCTM_OP-010_Introduction

1. Fly, Navigate, Communicate

Fly - this is referring to keeping the aircraft safely within its flight envelope and making sure the pitch, bank angle, heading, airspeed etc are all at the desired targets. This is achieved by the pilot flying controlling the aircraft through either use of the correct automation or by manual flying and pilot monitoring assisting and actively monitoring these parameters.

Navigate - make sure you're currently in the right place and heading in the right place. There's no point flying an aircraft at the perfect speed, straight and level if you're pointing at the side of the mountain. This is partly already taken care of in the 'fly' or 'aviate' section because your desired altitude target should be based on being above MSA. Airbus refer to knowing the 4 'know where' statements.
Know where you are…
Know where you should be…
Know where you should go…
Know where the weather, terrain, and obstacles are. I personally would add one more to that last one which is airspace because you might not want to fly into busy airspace if they're not expecting you, and you may not want to fly out of controlled airspace and lose radar control.
Communicate
People often assume that this just means with air traffic control but as pilots we also need to communicate with each other, cabin crew, ground staff, engineers, passengers etc. We also use communication for important jobs such as task sharing or running checklists. Communication is so important and that's why we have our standard phraseology and standard call outs.

2. Use appropriate level of automation

Its very important to make sure that we are always using the most appropriate automation available at any time. If used correctly the automatics can help us by drastically reducing our workload and freeing up our capacity which gives us more situational awareness Used incorrectly they can increase the workload and make a situation much worse. In Airbus' words we have to,

"- Determine and select the appropriate level of automation that can include manual flight

- Understand the operational effect of the selected level of automation
Confirm that the aircraft reacts as expected."

Basically, if the automatics aren't doing want you want, change the mode or take it out all together. Remember that all the automatics out is a level of automation and is a perfectly acceptable option.

3. Understand FMAs at all times

The Airbus has several levels of automation and we all know that there are ways that these can easily bite us if we're not careful.
The most important thing with the Airbus automatics is to ensure that what we select on the fcu or the mcdu is correctly displayed on the PFD or the ND. Understanding the different modes, how they interact and how they revert is very important and we will have a whole episode dedicated to this in the future. This leads on to golden rule number 4,

4. Take action if things do not go as expected

If the aircraft isn't doing what we want, we have to either solve the situation with automatics or take them out all together.
If at any point the aircraft doesn't follow the desired flight path or targets selected then the pilot flying should do whatever is appropriate. If the aircraft is in managed modes, change it to selected modes to demand exactly what you want.
If the aircraft is in selected modes, change it to manual flying.
The pilot monitoring should communicate with the pilot flying, challenge the actions of the pilot flying when necessary or take over if required.

Just a short one this week, next week we'll be looking at Air Conditioning to ease us in to the technical subjects....