Week 73: some tough scenarios to contend with

Following our relatively gentle start to Advanced, the flights this week have really pushed us to scratch around in the grey matter and work through some fairly hairy failures. The areas of focus were mainly the electrical and hydraulic failures, as deficiencies with either of these systems have some pretty far reaching consequences. 

Starting with the electrics, the Airbus really relies on these systems to be working because of the fly by wire architecture; put simply, if the electrics die, the computers that are responsible for the control protections are gone and things get quite interesting. We looked at the loss of both AC and DC electrics, and in different situation one or the other pilot would lose all their instrumentation, or in one extreme case (lightning strike) everything went dark for a few seconds. Common to most electrical failures there was a degradation to 'Alternate law' which makes the aircraft a little twitchy, but more importantly the normal protections are reduced. 

As for hydraulic, this really is a vital system. Even though computers power the flight control system, they are still sending signals to hydraulic actuator, which will move the desired control surface. Therefore no hydraulics, no control surface movement, and more importantly no ability to control the aircraft. With this in mind the nice chaps at Airbus have designed the A320 with three separate and independent hydraulic systems, with the philosophy that a loss of one makes the aircraft comfortably flyable. That said the loss of two out of three is a fairly bad situation, but the aircraft will still be controllable which fills me with confidence!

The actual failures weren't the only important element of this weeks flights, but the manner in which we dealt with them. There's little point running into a solution when its a load of rubbish, so the ECAM system (electronic centralized aircraft monitoring) gives a foundation for problem solving. But regardless of the failure, if the crew adhere strictly to the ECAM process failures should be dealt with quickly, accurately, and offer solutions without delay. We would also then be able to decide if continuing or diverting was the next step, therefore forcing us to consider ATC, the cabin crew, and the passengers who heard the bang down the back! 

Again failures will be on the cards this week, including rapid descents and engine failures. More worrying, that with 9 lessons to go I only have 19 days until my LST is complete. Get it over quick, I wanna get to the Airbus!