A320
Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP)
Flight Crew Type 366
Confusion; Training / Qualification
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
Flight Crew Became Reoriented
Company Policy; Procedure; ATC Equipment / Nav Facility / Buildings
As I was briefing the arrival; approach; missed approach; and engine out procedure it came to our attention that the SFO VOR being NOTAMed out of service could be an issue for our engine out procedure. On the Airbus; to fly the procedure; we put the SFO VOR in the RAD page. But; this is raw data. Neither the FO nor I could come up with a way to comply with the engine out procedure if we had an engine failure. We sent dispatch an ACARS Message and they came back saying the Duty Manager says use the pop up engine failure from the FMGC. I don't believe this is an option on our fleet or least not one we knew we had for SFO.Since 2 miles was easily seen on the fix page; we put the radial and distance in the fix page. I was told during training this month; that using the fix page is for INFO only and not operational in regards to radial and DME. When I got on the ground; I got a hold of the Line Captain that did my original training on the Airbus. He recommended building a point and coming up with as close as we could to the engine out procedure. Again; this is good info; but I'm not sure if the distance was SFO/2.3 and not 2.0 we would have been able to figure out where we would have been over the ground once we reached the 2.3 mile point. I think this needs to be looked into. I don't feel that on a fleet where we need raw data to compute this information (DME) we should be trying to guess where that point will be when we are in the middle of an emergency. If there is an easy way to use the FMGC to compute DME; it needs to be taught better; because in the short time that the FO and I had to plan for the arrival; we couldn't figure out how to do it.
A320 Captain reported questioning the engine out missed approach procedures specified by his company which requires the SFO VOR which was NOTAMed out of service.