American Airlines has signed an agreement with Airbus to install Enhanced Electronic Instrument System (EEIS2) LCD flight deck displays and new display computers on more than 100 A320 Family aircraft.

The new EEIS2 will replace current cathode ray tube displays and Display Management Computers (DMC) in a multi-year retrofit programme. Each A320 Family aircraft has six flight deck displays and three DMCs located in the avionics bay.

On-site engineering support

The EEIS2 equipment is built by Thales and integrated by Airbus, which will provide the necessary service bulletins and installation kits as well as on-site engineering support.

EEIS2 helps improve information displays for pilots thanks to its high resolution LCD screen and offers new system capabilities and features for American’s A320ceo fleet. In addition to these new system capabilities, the EEIS2 programme will also maximise fleet commonality, significantly reduce maintenance costs and deliver a 50kg weight saving per aircraft.

Air Canada

Elsewhere, Airbus announced that Canada’s largest airline, Air Canada, has chosen to install its “Descent Profile Optimisation” (DPO) function on the airline’s A320 and A330 Families. The enhancement to the aircraft’s on-board Flight Management System (FMS) performance database generates fuel savings and reduces C02 emissions through optimisation of the aircraft’s flight trajectory during descent.

Air Canada will install the DPO solution on 48 of its A320ceo Family aircraft and 18 A330ceo aircraft.

The DPO function enables aircraft to use an optimum engine model to compute the profile of the descent, requesting less fuel when the engine is using idle thrust. It reduces fuel consumption, resulting in proportional C02 and NOx reductions. In addition, it maximises the time spent at efficient cruise level by setting the top of descent later in the profile. The inefficient level-off stage is reduced by the FMS during the computation of the profile, without affecting the approach speed of the final approach.
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