Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Mikeyme1998 OP t1_j2vb8kk wrote

Reply to comment by Tie-Down in IAMA Canadian Avionics Technician, specializing in line maintenance and Garmin flight deck installations on a number of different airframes. Please, ask me anything! by Mikeyme1998

Hey there! Thanks for the question and for getting our next generation up in the air safely!

I've worked for a large airline pre-covid as well as the smaller shop that I'm with now, and I've noticed that most of the really neat stuff is concentrated towards the big jets, rather than smaller aircraft like the stuff I work with now. With the stuff I have now, it has a definitive identity and it mostly works to chase the changes in policy like ADS-B and diversity transponder (basically turning the transponder from air to ground to air based, to more air to air/space based... think communication to space based satellites rather than a ground station... this gets complicated due to the differences in US vs Canadian transponder infastructure). There are a lot of cool little hidden features in the small planes, like units that can autotune to a frequency based on GPS position (it knows ground is 121.8, so you can just 'tune ground' rather than dial in the frequency), or integrated airport charts that you can pull up on your screens which completely negate the need for an EFB with charts. I also really like synthetic vision and going in that direction for IFR flying.

But the REALLY cool stuff is on the big jets.

The Airbus A220 was just coming into our fleet as I was leaving, and I was privileged evough to run a bit of maintenance on it. The thing that blew me away is that this airliner had like, 10 buttons. The rest was all automatic or virtually controlled. It was like the inside of a really really nice car, instead of the spaceship esque interior were used to seeing. And on top of that, it had about 6 physical circuit breakers, with all the rest being virtual. You could go into your maintenance menu, select the type of maintenance you were doing, and the plane would just pull its own CBs. It was wild.

But the coolest part was the onboard communication integration.

During flight, it would send any snags that it sensed to an iPad that a maintenance personel had inside a van. That maintenance engineer could see the problem, and poke around the aircraft computers for info DURING FLIGHT from the ground. The plane would then talk to a database and tell the maintainer what parts it needed, give you the maintenance reference, tell you affected systems, etc... all while the plane was happily flying to you. I have never felt so obsolete in my life, but it was DAMN cool.

EDIT: Ok, the cockpit definitely has more than 10 buttons... The image I had in my mind was a bit different from reality! In general though, the layout and general complexity of the cockpit was vastly improved compared to what I usually saw in the A320 or 757/767/777.

42

jeanwolf t1_j2wkszd wrote

Thank you for doing this AMA! What is your opinion on the A220 other than that? Based on what you heard in general in the industry and on the fact that it is a relatively new aircraft and it's reliability remains to be proven?

3

Mikeyme1998 OP t1_j2wsvws wrote

Hey! You're very welcome, I'm learning as much as everyone else is by trying to give as good an answer as I can to you all!

In general, I worked on the A220 very little and I'm not trained in any official capacity on it (no type course or anything). Moreover, the aircraft operations I work with now don't really overlap with any A220 operators so take my answer with a grain of salt, and it's going to be pretty generalized.

The Airbus A220 was originally the Bombardier C110 and C130 (different variants) and was subsequently redesigned to the CS100 and CS300 in 2009. Bombardier had a rocky start with it, having an engine failure early on in flight testing and getting into a pretty aggressive race with Airbus and their A320 program, which Bombardier was attempting to square off against.

After more testing, the CS100 and CS300 got Transport Canada approval in 2015 and 2016 respectively, and in 2018 Airbus aquired the type certificate and rebranded to the A220. (I gathered most of this info from the Wikipedia article... I had no idea about the pretty fascinating history of this thing besides the Bombardier involvement so thank you for prompting this!)

My opinion on the aircraft is generally good. I think it was designed to try and do things differently both in terms of customer experience and technologically. Innovation is not something that aviation is altogether famous for, and generally when a company does so in such a way that Bombardier did they come under heavy scrutiny by both Transport and the commercial market (which, realistically, is pretty cornered). I think this point increases tenfold with the early issues that the C100/130 had in testing. Getting approvals for anything is a huge time dedication and requires incredible amounts of persistance, money, and time. Our company has been involved in applying and receiving STCs (basically paperwork and plans that allow and certify modifications for an aircraft) and they take years of work to complete. I can't imagine how much more intense the process is for a commercial passenger airliner.

All of that to say, I would trust a Canadian or American maintainted A220 with my life. But that is just based off of what I know of the airframe and moreover, the industry itself and our standards for safety. Things break, but in general there are always safety nets that pilots and aviation professionals can deploy to mitigate any real world risk in 99% of situations.

I will never say that aviation is perfectly safe, because nothing is perfectly safe. But I have seen the firsthand diligence and procedures that we go through to minimize the risk to the absolute lowest probability, and it's a risk that I accept and face whenever I fly commercially, privately, for flight tests, and everything in between.

6