Flightcrew Warning System - Part 3 - ECAM

As we have already discussed in the previous two posts

• Flightcrew Warning System - Part I - Background and
• Flightcrew Warning System - Part II - EICAS

since the 1960s the Aviation Industry started to push for a 2-person flight deck abandoning the previous and widely used 3-person flight deck philosophy.

To accomplish that, a completely new Flight Deck Philosophy and Design needed to be developed, tested, certified, and finally delivered to be TRAINED by the Operators.

In 1971 the recently created European aviation consortium - AIRBUS - launched the widebody A300B2 and -B4 but besides being a brand new airplane it was still designed with a 3-person flight deck.

In the early 1980s, Airbus finally switched from the traditional setup of a 3-crew flight deck (originally used on the A300B2 and -B4) to a two-person flight deck in the A300-600 that shared a common type-rating along with its younger sibling - the A310. AIRBUS commercially named its new 2-crew flight deck the “Forward Facing Crew-Cockpit” or "FFCC" for short.

The FFCC was equipped with a four-screen electronic flight-instrument system (EFIS), consisting of a primary flight display (PFD) and navigation display (ND) for each pilot and a revolutionary two-screen electronic centralized aircraft monitor (ECAM) that presented the airplane systems status and a systems modes diagrammatically, according to the airplane flight phase or situation - or as selected - and presents checklists & warnings in words.

This new FFCC flight deck also incorporated what AIRBUS called the “Dark & Quiet Cockpit” - DQC where in normal conditions the number of normal lights, annunciations, and indications were kept to a minimum, reducing the level of “NORMAL INFORMATION” presented and so that needed to be mentally processed by the two-Pilots (now that the FE was not in the flight deck to monitor and call out any abnormality anymore).

The idea behind this (in practice until today) was that when a malfunction occurs then a Light, an Annunciation or an Indication (paired or not with also an Aural Alert) would then come on, calling the Pilot’s Attention to the situation and driving them to recognize and address the malfunction using good CRM & the non-normal checklists.

To Be Continued . . .