@BeachAV8R if you think the motions of a helicopter are evil… Well don’t think too much about all the moving and rotating parts inside a gas turbine that is used to control the airflow(bleed valves, blowout valves, blocker doors, variable stator vanes, floating bearings, etc) 
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Out of sight, out of mind…
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Hehe, that is the mantra with which they are designed. Engines that sit on a fleet or aircraft, for example a United Airlines or Delta have a commonality rating, the FADEC system hides accurate engine information from the pilot and just tells the pilot that the engine is running optimally. So instead of saying the EGT is 532.2 celcius it will round it up or down for the whole fleet so the pilot always seems the same thing if the engine is running nominally. Pretty much what the flight engineer of old would do too, but still. Interesting, right?
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Yes!
No such fancy stuff on the BabyDash, though…
Although, I do sometimes feel that someone is rounding up the numbers…
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Wow, not on the dash? I suppose it’s only really for the big engines then, never worked on turbines that small unfortunately, I am sure they are easy to work on!
Say what?
I see wild variarions in engine indications all the time! And just a few years ago we were required to send hourly engine trend monitoring via ACARS. I don’t imagine they’d make us transpose all those values just to transmit fake data. Finally, this gets down to the faith pilots have in their equipment. The numbers must be real or we would stop flying and the FAA would stop certifying.
Well, what can I say. Engines get rated in a test cell for a certain performance window, once that is done the FADEC system has a certain leeway to skew the value’s displayed to the pilot within a certain range to show a commonality among all engines in a fleet.
Not sure why or who made you do that, there might be a myriad of reasons that this system is not on the aircraft you were flying. Hourly ACARS reports sound like a massive waste of time unless you expect the engine to self detonate at some point in the flight, perhaps it was just some busy body that had a bad idea at your airline?
Faith in the engine is a thing though, any FADEC engine treats pilot input as a suggestion and not as a command. It has the rights and powers to avoid any self destructive or damaging action. No, the numbers you see often aren’t a accurate indication for a engine.
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Our little dinky engines on our Citations and King Airs have “trend monitoring” sheets that we are supposed to fill out periodically. There is no requirement to do it every flight…but once a week or so someone jots down the whole range of numbers:
- Date
- Flight Level
- OAT
- ITT
- N1
- N2 (or prop RPM)
- Oil Pressure
- Oil Temperature
- Engine Cycles
- ANTI ICE ON or OFF
Ostensibly it is so the maintainers can spot an anomaly over time. Our guys do engine changes all the time (put on loaners while ours go get heavier maintenance) and some of that process is tweaking the engine outputs to match the L and R sides. Pilots hate when things don’t match. But some things just don’t - (ie: one engine will run with a bit more oil PSI or temperature)…
Anyway - I rather like that I don’t have FADECs - it keeps me awake tweaking engines all during the climb and descent…
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And this is exactly what this system does, only then software wise instead of mechanical. Which makes it easy to change that skew if you for example lease it outside of your own fleet.
I can imagine! It’s really neat to be able to see all that info!
That is correct, although for a modern airliner it’s all a bit more automated, for example in the QAR. Engineering then determines when a engine needs to go for maintenance and decides on the bill of work that needs to be done. Sometimes it’s also about life limit parts that have reached their maximum cycle limit.
I don’t just believe but KNOW that the indications we read are as accurate as the sending units allow. It would be criminal for the manufacturer to do anything less. It is certainly correct that the pilot has no control over any of the magic. Unless the EEC is broken, we just control thrust lever angle, FADEC makes all the decisions about what to do with that angle. It’s a wonderful system that requires accuracy and trust.
That is the devils’ airplane mang! you need to play it Slayer in the pre-flight or else it will crash on friday the 13th not killing but horribly maiming you and all your crew and passengers!
Well, perhaps your engines are but a lot of them aren’t and the manual says so in that case.
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I always hum ‘Disciple’ on my walk-arounds…
Add another threat to the matrix - SAM, AAA… ELK
Oh…deer…
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As awesome as it was (and maybe it was a perspective issue). Not so sure I would have my daughter or son that close to all those moving bits…
Cool Chopper though.
I’m just amazed at the girl in the foreground that doesn’t turn around to witness the awesomeness of the miracle of blade borne flight. I mean really…
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Well…that’s trust for you…
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