There are actually a number of things on it that are well thought out. For instance there is one circuit breaker panel in the cockpit, it is at the rear of the overhead panel. The circuit breakers are grouped with others from the same system, so if you’re looking for a circuit breaker for a hydraulic pump it will be in a section labelled “hydraulics”. The label at the top of each circuit breaker says what bus it comes from and the label below the circuit breaker says what item it powers. The Dash 8 (the only other largish aircraft I have for comparison) has circuit breakers grouped into the electrical busses they live on and there are circuit breakers behind each pilot. So if you’re looking for a circuit breaker for a hydraulic pump you need to remember what bus it’s powered from and you need to remember if it’s powered from any other busses as well, then you need to find that bus on the correct panel. The latter way is much easier from an engineering point of view, the circuit breaker panels are essentially the electrical busses, but it can be a real pain finding the one you want.
The systems switches and dials themselves are all grouped together on the overhead panel, so everything to do with the air conditioning will be in one place. This is a good thing and reflects modern cockpit design.
On the other hand some design philosophy kind of makes sense but is quite different to what I’m used to. On the Dash 8 switches are forwards on the overhead panel or up on vertical panels when on and backwards or down for off. This makes it easy to remember which way to switch a switch if you want to turn something on or off. On the 146 they are mainly rocker switches and are almost all on when pushed toward the rear EXCEPT for one or two that are OFF when pushed toward the rear. I can only guess this is because they are normally OFF and so under normal conditions all of the switches are lined up.
The Dash 8 has the same EFIS (electronic flight instrument system) as the 146 (the ones that actually have EFIS), but on the Dash 8 you turn the EFIS on by turning the dim knob for each screen up to bright. At the full dim position there is a detent that turns the screen off. The 146 has the same dim/bright knobs with the same detent that turns the screen off, but it also has avionics master switches that must be on, and EFIS master switches that must be on. Why? I don’t know. Bombardier didn’t think that kind of overengineering was necessary on the Dash 8 and it works perfectly well.
To test the VOR on the 146 you have to select a non-local VOR frequency, set the course bar to 180 and push the test switch, the course bar will show on course and the bearing pointers will point to 180 degrees on the RMI and HSI. Every other aeroplane I’ve flown you can test the VOR just by tuning a local frequency and noting that there are no flags on the HSI.
I think what’s happened on the master warning panel (MWP) is that someone has decided you should be able to set the brightness of the warning lights, so there is a dim knob, but if the dimming circuitry fails you need to be able to override the dimming circuitry and set it to full bright so you can see the lights. You also then need a caution light to tell you the dimming circuitry has failed, so you now have an override switch and a couple of caution lights that bypass the dimming circuitry. It is also important that when a caution light first comes on, it should be full bright and not dimmed so it gets your attention. Once you’ve seen the caution light you push the master warning cancel button which stops the master warning from flashing and dims the cautions back down
Now to test that all this works you need to dim everything down to check the dimming circuitry is working, you then push the test button to see that all of the lights in each caution caption is working and that they all come on bright initially, you then need to push the warning cancel button to see that they all go dim EXCEPT the cautions for the dimming circuitry which should bypass the dimming circuitry and remain bright. You then let go of the test button and everything that is on should be dim, then you check the dim override switch is working so the lights come on bright again, and then you set the override back to normal and the dim knob to whatever brightness you desire for the flight.
The Dash 8 has a dim/bright switch that controls all warnings, cautions, and advisory lights in the cockpit. You have it dim at night and bright during the day, if it fails to dim, well it doesn’t really matter, they’re not so dim that you can’t see them. So the only test required is to check that all of the lights are working, push one test switch and you’re done in a couple of seconds.
There is some logic there on the 146, it just seems unnecessarily complicated.
Part of the problem is not so much the aeroplane design, but that the company I’m working for have a vast range of aeroplanes of different ages. We have the second and third 146s off the production line with manual passenger oxygen deployment, analogue flight instruments, and GPS added as an after thought, and we have the modern version called the Avro RJ with automatic chemically generated passenger oxygen, computer controlled engines, glass cockpit and fully integrated flight management computers with GPS. There is everything in between as well. Every aeroplane is different. The Dash 8s I’d been flying were damn near close to identical to each other in the cockpit and when a new one came on the line it was modified to the same standard as all of the others. It didn’t matter which one you flew, they were all the same.
Yeah, these Whisper Jets are genuinely quiet. The company does charter, mainly specialising in flying mining workers to and from work under contracts to the mining companies. They also have a night freight contract that they will probably keep for ever because they are the only 146 operators in the country and the 146 is the only aeroplane quiet enough to be able to land at Sydney at night during the curfew. They are so quiet that when I first flew with them as a passenger with Ansett New Zealand 20 years ago part of the pre-take-off brief warned that the flaps make a lot of noise when retracting. It’s not so much that the flaps make a lot of noise but the engines are so quiet that you can hear all the little bumps, wooshes, and grinds coming from the wing.
True, however the view for many passengers on a low wing aircraft such as the various Boeings is of the wing.
Edit: The BAe 146 and the Dash 8 were first produced at about the same time. The differences seem to be related to design philosophy rather than age.
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