A320
Flight Crew Multiengine; Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP); Flight Crew Instrument
Troubleshooting; Workload
Aircraft Equipment Problem Less Severe; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural MEL / CDL
Flight Crew Overcame Equipment Problem
Aircraft; MEL
The inbound [Maintenance Release] condition was 8 pages long prior to NAV IR 2 FAULT ECAM [Electronic Centralized Aircraft Monitor] and subsequent deferral. A few items of note are described below to show the added workload.Weather Radar System deferral includes the loss of the Predictive Windshear System. This deferral required additional thorough review of adverse weather and supplementary procedures during preflight planning due to the Flight Planning Restrictions and flight crew procedures of this deferral. Rudder Trim 2 Fault Deferral resulted in the downgrade of the Autoland capabilities to CAT 3 Single. It required an extensive test procedure of the remaining Rudder Trim System prior to each departure and required coordination with Ramp Service Agents.Nav IR (Inertial Reference) 2 Fault Deferral per the [Maintenance Release] NOTE states: 'THE HEADING MUST BE ENTERED THROUGH THE CDU KEYBOARD FOR THE IR 1 AND HAS TO BE FREQUENTLY RESET.' This deferral also required the WiFi to be deferred and maintaining the transponder in XPDR mode for all phases of flight eliminating TCAS operation completely.All procedures and flight crew responsibilities per the [Maintenance Release] were followed and completed as directed. However; once airborne; [the] Captain; [the] Pilot Monitoring; attempted to reset the IR heading and found the instructions lacking. First; the [Maintenance] instructions state IR 1 should have the heading reset; but IR 1 was in NAV mode per the FM (Flight Manual) IR heading is entered when an IR is set to ATT (Attitude) mode (FM 6.XXX.XX.X & X). So we attempted to set the heading for IR 2 after finding the FM procedure NAV - IR Alignment in ATT Mode (FM 2.XXX.XX); using the direction for a keyboard with and H on the 5 keyboard. This procedure resulted in the following message on the ADIRS display '- - - - ATT MODE;' but the heading wouldn't reset. Unfortunately; after making several attempts to follow what instruction we could find to confirm our systems knowledge the resets continued unsuccessfully. The Captain contacted [Maintenance Control] via ACARS; but that proved undesirable due to the complexity of the procedure. He tried via [Commercial Radio]; but there was a Medical Emergency Med Link priority; so ATC contacted us with another frequency to reach company. At this point; he made contact with Dispatch; but [Maintenance Control] wasn't able to join this frequency so dispatch relayed our issue. [Maintenance Control] made several attempt to send instruction via ACARS; but they didn't provide any further detail. The Captain continued making attempts to 'frequently reset' the heading without success. At some point the flight attendants called because the passengers were concerned about connections and unhappy due to the delay. This was a byproduct of the WiFi MEL preventing use of the [company] APP; so we printed connecting gates via ACARS. Due to the relatively short flight we had begun descent into [the destination airport] and started planning for the parallel visual approach without TCAS to help in identifying the other aircraft in close proximity.The Rudder Trim 2 Fault and NAV IR 2 Fault were very intermittent which resulted in use of the Emergency Cancel function of the ECAM control panel to eliminate these nuisance repetitive ECAMs and Master Caution Alerts.While safety of flight was never in question; there was workload saturation and less than normal situational awareness as the Pilot Monitoring handled the additional responsibilities.
A320 First Officer reported that the aircraft was dispatched with numerous MELs which caused extra workload for the flight crew.