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Any A330 drivers/trainers/engineers here?

Started by Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers, Fri, 20 Nov 2020 16:21

Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

I have a low-level ECAM/FWC question...

cpt_oliver

Hi Jeroen,

I was flying as CPT on 330 for 8 years. I should find an answer in my books. What exactly is the question?

Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

It's typically one of those things that few books mention.

What, exactly, drives the (lower) ECAM (status) message "SATCOM" ? And more specifically, what conditions, discretes, bus labels etc. need to be present to make it go away? I have a fully functional SATCOM box aboard and it works for everything, but this pesky ECAM does not want to budge.


Hoppie

cpt_oliver

According to the books SATCOM as a status message is annunciated with the following

"Triggering conditions:
This alert triggers when voice and data communications via SATCOM are inoperative"

It is only crew awareness and you cannot get rid of it as long as the condition is present. Once you regain Voice comm it changes to SATCOM DATA , the moment you get data and voice communication again it will disappear.

I hope this is of any help-greetings to Florida

Oliver

Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

Yes, this is where it stops. The issue is that I am not a maintenance tech or pilot, but the design engineer of the SATCOM unit.

I am sitting inside my box and I know that both voice and data communications are fully fine, and everything is nice and cozy. I am trying to tell the @%$#%@#@ airplane that it should therefore reflect my happiness and remove the #$%@#$@ amber SATCOM message from ECAM @#%$@#@ grrrr.

There's no docu that tells me exactly what this A330 kind of machine wants to see on my 429 bus to withdraw that pesky message.

In the mean time I snooped on the 429 bus of another A330 with somebody else's box... and found that they set the SDI to 1... which is against ARINC 741 standard... so I'm going to try just this, coming Sunday night...


Hoppie

hopefully nobody now got totally dissappointed on how avionics are developed

cagarini

Quote from: Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 00:01

hopefully nobody now got totally dissappointed on how avionics are developed

Nahhh... I'm just feeling super fine I don't have it in my glider :-)

Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

(Yawn) another night spent staring at screens being generated at the other side of the planet.

It turned out that our guess that it was the @$%#$@# SDI bit of label 270, was correct. The new software removed all caution messages from ECAM. Clean slate.

Of course then other issues appeared elsewhere. Never-ending story.


Hoppie

United744

Wow. Airbus can't just tell you?? A new low for software engineering.

Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

<soapbox mode ON>
It's not that Airbus (or Boeing or Embraer or any other airframer) could not tell us. It is that we, as a small independent avionics manufacturer, do not have access to either of them.

Airframers talk to their customers through huge stacks of documentation, typically through a customized web site. The airframer knows which exact tails the customer operates, and only the documents become available that the customer absolutely needs to operate those tails. Customers do not need to know the content of all 429 buses. So the doc stops at "if you see XYZ ABC 123, then (try this/replace that)".

Component maintenance manuals for the repair shops also don't have this information. They have enough to repair, but this is always hardware-related. Software development documentation is a different ballgame. I never saw one of those documents, except for our own projects and purpose-written ICDs for the other end if we had a co-development going on.

Getting the dirty details of an aircraft you have not seen before, or an aircraft that has seen four previous owners and has been Frankensteined, is one of the major forms of art in this business.

We sometimes have the luck to get an aircraft that we originally equipped showing back up after we "lost it". The new customer calls us "hey, we saw a black and yellow box here that has your phone number on it, what is it?" Says enough.


Hoppie

IefCooreman

#9
Quote from: Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 00:01
hopefully nobody now got totally dissappointed on how avionics are developed

Avionics? Are they "developed"?

I was under the impression engineers got so lost in their own mess, they decided to create the term PBN just to give us the idea that it all had a long term purpose from the beginning...

Grin...