AIRBUS A319/A320/A321:

FIXES AND DME ARCS

This document is specific to the PSS Airbus A319/A320/A321 MCDU.

Entering a Fix into the Airbus MCDU

There are many occasions when it might be necessary for you to enter a fix into the
Airbus MCDU because there is not a pre-programmed waypoint in the Airbus database.
For example this could be when ATC gives you a specific instruction or when planning
to fly a DME arc. If you don’t have a named waypoint in the database there are three
ways to enter a fix:

Place/Bearing/Distance (PBD)

Place-Bearing/Place-Bearing (PBX)

Latitude/Longitude (LL)

Each of these has its uses although the PBD is the easiest one to use and the one you are
most likely to use. In order to enter these you will need to consult charts, and for the PBX
and LL fixes it will be very helpful if you have en route charts or access to a flight
planing program like FSNavigator. But I have included portions of the relevant charts
within this guidance for ease of reference.
For this scenario we are on an approach to runway 25 at Belfast Aldergrove (EGAA)
from Birmingham (EGBB). Unfortunately Aldergrove is not currently in the British
Airways schedule, but it provides good practice for entering fixes and DME arcs.

Place/Bearing/Distance (PBD)

Looking at the chart you will see that we need to make a turn to the
right to start a n arc 14 miles from BEL (D14.0 BEL), in other words
two miles after the D16.0 BEL fix. But the D14 BEL fix is not in the
flightplan or in the MCDU database so we need to enter it manually.

The way you it is exactly as the description describes: 1) the place then 2) the bearing
from that place then 3) the distance from that place. In this case the place is BEL, the
bearing is shown on the chart as 131 degrees from BEL, and the distance is 14 miles from
BEL.
Call up the lateral revision page from the named waypoint before D14.BEL. You then
enter the P/B/D fix into the scratchpad of the MCDU in the following format:

BEL/131/14
place bearing distance

Then press the Next Waypoint LSK and confirm it by pressing the Insert LSK and the fix
will be entered into the MCDU and will be shown as PBD01. As you enter more fixes the
names will increment: PBD02..03..04 etc. If you delete a fix and re-enter it you will find
that the numbering becomes out of sequence, PBD02 before PBD01 perhaps, but don’t
worry about this. The airplane will not fly the fixes in numerical order but in the strict
order they are in the MCDU.

You might not always have the bearing conveniently shown on your chart. In this case
I’m afraid it means reverting to your old PPL techniques of using a protractor and a
pencil or estimating the bearing.

Place-Bearing/Place-Bearing (PBX)

You are likely to use this method of entering a fix far less
frequently than the Place/Bearing/Distance method. It is used to
place a fix at the intersection of two airways and unless you have en
route charts it can be a fiddly process. If you were in the Scouts and
did map reading, you may remember this as triangulation. It is also
a method that was used during the second world war to determine a pilot’s location.

There might be an DME associated with the intersection so you can enter that as a named
waypoint, but if not you will need to enter it manually into the MCDU. When you have
done this it gives you a fix named PBX01 (the X quite logically denoting the crossing of
two airways).
Let us suppose that on the way to Belfast we have been routed via the Wallasey VOR
(WAL) and then receive the following ATC clearance: “BAW448 at Wallasey turn right
heading 2 degrees and intercept A25/W2D to Isle of Man”.

Look at chart (from FSNavigator) here

and you will see that there isn’t anything
at the intersection of the A25 and W2D
airways, so how can we enter this into
the MCDU?

You need to enter the Place-Bearing/Place-Bearing fix from the nearest VORs. In this
case you would enter:

WAL-002/POL-289
You would then press ‘the Next Waypoint” LSK and then confirm that with the Insert
LSK. After that you would enter IOM as the next waypoint from the PBXxx fix if it was
not already in the flightplan.
 Latitude/Longitude (LL)

This is rarely used as it can be difficult to work out exact latitude and
longitude co-ordinates. But if you have appropriate charts or
FSNavigator you can enter a specific latitude/longitude fix. Looking at
the chart on the previous the interception of the A25 and W2D airways is at coordinates
of 53 53.16N/003 12.55W. To enter this as a fix you would enter it in the format:

5353.2N/312.6W
Then press the ‘Next Waypoint’ LSK and the co-ordinates will be entered as a fix marked
LL01. If you look at the lateral revision page from this LL01 fix you will see at the top of
the page that the coordinates it actually puts in are very slightly different: on mine I had
53 15.19N/003 12.59W but I have not yet found a way of entering the coordinates more
accurately than this, but the small difference should not cause you any problems.

Note: While writing this guidance leaflet I noticed that if you repeatedly put in several
PBX or LL fixes and then delete them and do it again, after a while the database just adds
the nearest VOR instead of what you are trying to enter. I do not know if this is a bug
with the software but the only workaround I found was to shutdown the flight simulator
and reload it. This is something for you to be aware of if you practice entering these
fixes.
 DME ARCS
It is quite likely that at some stage you will need to fly a DME arc as you
transition from en route to the final approach fix. As you know, DME stands for
Distance Measuring Equipment and the way it works is that the aircraft sends an
interrogation signal to the ground based beacon which responds with a reply signal. The
equipment on board the airplane measures the time difference between the two signals
and calculates the straight line distance between the airplane and the beacon.

A DME arc is a course that the airplane flies at a set distance from the beacon. Normally
the margin of error is 1 mile which means you should not fly more than one mile either
side of the arc at any time.

Looking back at the Belfast Runway 25 Approach Chart we used earlier we entered the
PBD fix at D14 BEL but we now need to enter the rest of the arc. Can we do this in one
entry? No, we can’t. It would in theory be possible to fly from the D14 BEL point direct
to the D12.9 IAG fix shown on the chart but this risks going outside the one mile
tolerance of the arc.

So the way to enter the DME into the MCDU is to enter a series of straight legs. If you
look very closely at the arc itself on the chart you will see that it has been drawn this way
rather than as a pure arc. At the end of each straight leg will be a heading change of
between (usually but not always by any means) 10 and 30 degrees depending on how
shallow the arc is. The more shallow the arc is the lower the amount of heading change
required.

The decision on the number of fixes you put into the arc rests with you: the more you put
in the more closely the airplane will follow the exact arc; the fewer you put in the more
you risk deviating from the arc. But you also have to bear in mind that a shallow arc will
probably require fewer fixes than a fairly tight arc. 3 or 4 fixes is often sufficient. Some
approach charts will give you sensible fixes already marked which speeds entering the
data.

You enter the DME Arc into the MCDU as a series of PBD fixes. So the entry to the arc
is at BEL/131/14 and the last point on the DME arc is BEL/083/14 (it shows this fix as
D12.9 IAG but IAG is the ILS DME which you cannot enter that here). So we will enter
the arc as follows:

BEL/131/14
BEL/111/14
BEL/091/14
BEL/083/14
The fixes that this puts in are 5 miles apart until the last one which only 2 miles and then
the localiser will be captured for runway 25. You can see this in the image below as well
as the DME Arc as shown in the plan view on the ND.

Make sure you put in an altitude constraint of 4000 for each of the PBD fixes in the arc
until the last one which should have an alt itude constraint of 2470 as these are the
altitudes shown on the chart.

You can test how closely you fly the DME arc by entering the BEL VOR 117.2 into the
FREQ/VOR2 entry on the RAD NAV page of the MCDU (LSK 1R). Make sure that on
the FCU you have the right hand switch under the range knob set to VOR so you can
monitor the distance at the bottom right of the ND, although you can also monitor it on
the standby DME 2 gauge. While you are in the arc the distance to the BEL VOR should
be no less than 13 miles and no more than 15 miles (the one mile tolerance). While flying
the arc to test this tutorial the distance between the PBD fixes kept at a steady 13.8 or
13.9 miles from BEL, so the number of fixes we put in was right.

If you have any questions or comments about this tutorial, please let me know at the
email address below.

Rob Elliott
Airbus Fleet Training Captain
British Airways Virtual
airbusfleet@speedbirdonline.co.uk
www.speedbirdonline.co.uk/airbus.html

Version 1: June 2003