I stumbled across this little snippet earlier – I hope Airbus don’t use MS Windows on their flightdecks!!
Pilots of Airbus A320-series airliners are getting new guidance on what to do if the screens on their electronically biased aircraft go blank. “Checklists will be streamlined so re-booting of power is quicker,” an Airbus spokesman told the London Daily Mirror after Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch released a REPORT on an incident aboard a British Airways A319 last October. The plane was carrying 76 passengers to Budapest from London when most of the electronic displays went blank. The crew was able to bring everything back online in 90 seconds and the passengers were blissfully unaware of the glitch. The incident brought to light five similar instances on Airbuses. In the October incident, the plane was over southern England when the crew heard an audible “clunk.” Five of six screens went out, the intercom and radio failed, the autopilot and autothrottles disengaged and most of the cockpit lights went out. The captain took over the controls and flew night VFR (fortunately it was a clear night) while he and the first officer sorted out the power failure. The flying pilot’s task was further complicated by the fact that the backup analog instruments aren’t lit. The AAIB has issued a series of safety recommendations but its final report isn’t finished yet.
By: wysiwyg - 29th April 2006 at 00:07
Coming out of Shanghai recently I called for gear up. The other guy moved the lever up but nothing happenned. The A340 undercarriage is controlled by something called an LGCIU (landing gear control and interface unit) which is essentially just one of the many computers. There are in fact 2 LGCIU’s which take it in turns to do their job, swapping over on each gear extension. When the gear failed to retract we recycled the lever in order to utilise the other LGCIU but still nothing happened. The next option was to reset both LGCIU’s in the hope that one would come back online. This is done by pulling out what looks like a circuit breaker on the overhead panel and interupts the power supply to that computer. Pushing it back in restores power and ‘reboots’ it. In our case this did the job and up came the wheels.
Hope that was simple enough!
By: HP81 - 28th April 2006 at 15:24
Sorry for the laymans speak….but rebooting an airbus/boeing/bombardier/embraer is it a lot more technical than doing Ctrl ALT Delete?
No not really, just remove the power from the affected computer. This isn’t necessarily a final solution to a problem of course.
By: Dantheman77 - 28th April 2006 at 11:10
Sorry for the laymans speak….but rebooting an airbus/boeing/bombardier/embraer is it a lot more technical than doing Ctrl ALT Delete?
By: exmpa - 28th April 2006 at 08:20
Rebooting a modern airliner is a fairly common occurrence,
Maybe you would like to enlighten us further with reference to types listed on your licence or for which you hold engineering approvals?
exmpa
By: andrewm - 27th April 2006 at 22:55
Ive had this problem ALOT lol. As Mark L can testify!
By: HP81 - 27th April 2006 at 22:30
I have not read either report, but it looks as if the procedures followed by the pilots resulted in satisfactory results, with the lighting issue being the main problem that needs addressing.
Rebooting a modern airliner is a fairly common occurrence, fortunately it mostly happens on the ground.
S.B.
By: Ren Frew - 27th April 2006 at 22:23
It’s a shame threads like these with the potential for topical discussion get chucked off the front page fairly quickly 🙂
Fair enough Matthew, but would you care to explain post 2 in layman’s terms ?
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April 25, 2006 at 10:57 pm