I fly for an overseas airline and come to find out that pretty much only in the US (Canada?) does the FO do the walk around. I just can't seem to get away from walkarounds in my aviation career!! I never knew til I came overseas that I was destined to do walkarounds for the rest of my career!!! Ugh.....

Also, my company does not use Jepps, but rather LIDO charts (Lufthansa thing). I think Fedex uses them as well.... But that wouldn't have an effect on the airplane database time/date.

I was 20 years at a major US before coming overseas and to be honest I don't remember the 0901Z cut off time.... but that's what I"m looking for and it's nowhere to be found my all my company manuals and documentation. No guidance at all.... at least that I can find.

Someone brought up a great point about a long haul (or even short haul) where the date changes enroute to destination.... At one particular airport I operate at, there was a major change to the arrival STARS and during the complex arrival of 20 or more aircraft at one time, some of them had updated the FMS prior to takeoff, knowing that they may not have the correct SID out of departure airport, but they'd have the correct STAR into arrival airport. Others did the opposite and did not have the correct STAR's into destination causing a big problem and everyone ended up being radar vectored.

During the flight in question here, I considered recycling the dates knowing it would dump everything but we could just rebuild the route etc in a few minutes time or less and.... of course we'd have to engage hdg/trk select and engage Alt Hold before doing this. But decided against it since I wasn't sure if we'd be able to get any of it back... and if we couldn't it would have been a pretty bad situation as the Triple 7 is essentially run by the FMS.

I've asked a few guys here at my airline and there doesn't seem to be any standard answer... and it's just not found in the books.

Jepp being the class act it is, I'm not surprised it's mentioned in there. Miss my old Jepps....! Most of the places we fly don't have controllers who are even aware of things like this and wouldn't have any clue to ask us if we have the updated arrivals etc!! LOL

Bottom line is... I still can't see that we did anything against SOP's.

Kap

 

Not sure about the 777, but in both types that I fly, you can't change the FMS database while airborne.

 

At UPS the captain does all walk arounds unless there is a third crewmember acting as the Iro. at ups the Iro is normally a first officer and in this cause he would preform the walk around

 

The FE does my walkaround....

 

At my workplace we depart with current database and build procedures as needed or just don't accept ones we can't.

 

According to JEPP fly. Deck Pro 0000 UTC

 

I have a pretty simplistic mind and have wondered why the people who make these FMS's could not make the date look like this:

(Current) 3Mar13/3Apr13
(Next) 4Apr13/5May13


Would there be ANY doubt as to when these expire or changeover? I say not in the least.

One would end at 2359 on the end of the current date and the next would start at 0000 on the 4th (in this case).

Too simple so I must be missing something as to the reason they put the dates overlapping.

Anyways, thanks for the input gents... all appreciated.

Kap

 

Anal, OCD infected pilots would still have questions. Is it "Current" or "Valid". Is this in FAR Part 1, defined ?

etc

 

No doubt, questions like these are so ridiculous, I get the curiosity, I really do but in the end is this really that big of a deal? While you are worrying about this you are missing the 10 other issues you missed that are not SOP/Legal - the FAA could find something on every single flight to pull your certificates if they really wanted to.

 

yes agree.