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Aviation History
1981
1981 - 2087.PDF
FLIGHT International, 27 June 1981 1997 German pilots design their three-man A310 flightdeck VEREINIGUNG Cockpit Association, the German airline pilots' and engin eers' group, has produced and pre sented at Paris an Airbus Industrie A310 cockpit mockup to show exactly what it wants, and why, reports David Learmount from Paris. Luft hansa will be the first airline to take delivery of the A310^-in March 1963 —and the airline insists that it will buy the aircraft with a forward-facing cockpit layout, whether it is operated by two men or three. The mockup ultimately presents the side-facing engineers' panel that the aircrew unions want, but replaceable panels for all crew positions enable the Cockpit Association representa tives to start with the Airbus recom mended layout, argue its faults panel by panel, and substitute the Airbus ideas with the aircrew ones. It is an impressive spare-time effort by these line pilots and engineers, and it makes two points very clear: the strength of their feeling on the case; and their recognition of the fact that, though they have succeeded in producing some convincing arguments and statis tics to support the three-man crew case, they had not effectively ex plained why the third man should face sideways. What the crews want The flightdeck the aircrews want is much the same as that which Air France ordered last year for its A310s, which is not at all like the present A300 conventional SFCC (side-facing crew cockpit). The engineer's panel is more compact, set further forward, in clined at 15° to the fore-and-aft line so the third crewmember can monitor it during flight phases when he faces forward, and contains the systems CRT (cathode ray tube) which Airbus would normally put just to the left of the copilot's panel. Air France is going to have to pay for its unique cockpit, so the European and US air crew unions are trying to make sure that its order does not turn out to be unique. Airbus had explained that in stalling an A300 flightdeck in the A310 is not feasible because of the need to tie A310 digital features in with A300 analogue ones. An argument against the SFCC which the aircrew unions had found difficult to refute was that of crew redundancy: if the engineer got food- poisoning, who could operate his panel? Their answer is that all essen tial engineer actions can be carried out from the pilots' seats. Who can cross-monitor the engineer? Answer: the captain—he turns his head to the side instead of the more disorientating "side-and-up" motion. Can the captain read the side panel though—surely it's miles away? Answer: it's no further away than the most distant of the overhead instruments; there are big analogue dials well-spaced in schematic patterns instead of clusters of identical pushbuttons; and the line of sight from the captain's eye refer ence' position is not at such an acute angle to the panel. What if it is the captain who is sick? Answer: you can't have every thing. But then if you had only a two-man crew . . . Vereinigung Cockpit suggests many small changes to the main panels— changes unrelated to crew comple ment—like larger standby flight in struments. The Association says that these are the kind of logical improve ments which would be made before aircraft service entry if only manu facturers and airlines would consult the users—the line pilots—instead of just the company test pilot. But the main arguments are still about crew complement, and the mockup provides a court in which to present the de fence for the three-man crew. The prosecution alleges simply that modern aeroplane systems reduce crew workload, making a third man unnecessary and a nuisance. The de fence is based on two contentions: first, workload has in fact increased; secondly, the side-facing panel pro vides the best crew position to make sure that the two pilots are never overloaded. An example of the latter is given in repositioning the systems CRT from the pilots' normal field of vision and giving it to the engineer; if there is a main hydraulic systems failure the pilots should not be dis tracted by having a systems diagram flash up in full colour in front of them —they would not need or use the in formation anyway until they had car ried out the immediate actions from memory, or from the warning screen or the cards. Leave the pictures with the engineer, say the unions, in a place where the captain can refer when he has made the aircraft safe. The aircrew unions are becoming progressively more sophisticated in the presentation of their arguments, and may match the manufacturers soon. It is as if they have always known what they meant, but not hav ing been faced with a challenge like this before they have not had time to marshal their thoughts. For instance, they now present more cogently their primary argument as to why the air lines cannot say that since the two- man DC-9, 737 and One-Eleven are safe, the two-man A310 will be safe: the three former types were designed from the outset as two-pilot aero planes, say the unions: but "the A310 is an aircraft designed for three men that is being forced to be operated by two. Being a basically unchanged A300, the shortened fuselage and new wing are of no importance as regards crew workload ... it is to be operated in exactly the same way as the A300, except that additional features are built in so as to operate the aircraft more economically. The conversion takes place by taking the [A300's] sidefacing engineer's panel and add ing it to the existing overhead panel. Thereby a lot of information, clearly distinguishable switches and ergono- mic work patterns are sacrificed [and replaced by] many small pushbuttons of the same size set very close to gether." The aircrew point out that their re searches show that the Airbus "dark, quiet cockpit" philosophy does not cover all circumstances: "there are procedures for malfunctions where buttons that are not lit up have to be looked for. We believe that finger trouble during turbulence as well as at night makes the application of these procedures not only difficult, but almost dangerous." To be fair to Air bus, the overhead panel as shown now will be further developed. No-go workload reducers The unions home in again on the Airbus contention that the warning and systems CRTs, supposed to be the main workload-reducers in the cock pit, are not no-go items. So, the argu ment goes, in this case it's back to checklists and manuals in a cockpit where more information and control is potentially available, but it is more difficult to extract in a cockpit which is designed on the assumption that the screens will normally work. Now the aircrew dig out some figures to illustrate workload comparisons: first, dealing with non-emergency abnorm alities, they say that in the two-man 737 there are 135 potential actions per crew member to carry out; in the three-man A30O there are 127; and in the two-man A310 there are 234. In emergency situations the respective figures are 71, 121, and 146. The unions maintain that Airbus literature disguises this information by em phasising the high degree of auto mation, and that the company does not point out that in some cases there is no provision for manual override in the case of automatic change-over. The aircrew say they expect addi tional workload from a higher-than- normal rate of false warnings, because this is their experience of new elec tronic equipment in aeroplanes flying now. Having said that, they do not oppose the introduction of any new equipment, but want what they con sider realistic crewing policy while the gremlins are being purged.
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