London City Numbers (PERF APPR)

This is an exercise for the simulator, and it drills numbers only. When it was written in October 2026 no A320 was permitted to land at London City: the published approach is a 5.5 degree ILS, valid only for aircraft certified at that angle, and the airport's own airspace change proposal says the A320neo cannot be certified to it. A 4.49 degree RNP-AR approach for that aircraft was proposed to the CAA as ACP-2025-003, and nothing in this exercise depends on the outcome. This page does not choose an approach. That happens on ARRIVAL, which is why FINAL here reads dashes: nothing has put an approach in the flight plan. ARRIVAL would have nothing to offer here anyway. The trainer's coded procedure data covers US airports and Paris Charles de Gaulle only, so departures, arrivals and approaches exist nowhere else. Runways everywhere are real, procedures are not, and that is why this exercise stays on PERF APPR.

The minimum you enter at the end of this exercise is an altitude, and an altitude only means something against the right pressure setting. Take the QNH from the ATIS you have just read, never from memory or from the last flight.

This is the temperature at destination. The FCOM says the system uses it to refine its computation of the descent profile, so a stale value is a small error in everything the FMS predicts on the way down.

The ILS chart shows runway 09's final approach track as 092 degrees magnetic, so 090/12 is almost straight down the runway: a 12 kt headwind. Keep that number in mind, because you need it two steps from now.

The UK AIP and the ILS chart both give London City a transition altitude of 6000 ft, the figure used across the London area. A real unit takes this field from its navigation database and the crew can change it. This trainer shows a default of 5000 until you type over it, so read the value off the chart rather than trusting what the field already shows.

VAPP = VLS + one third of the tower headwind, with a minimum of +5 kt and a maximum of +15 kt. One third of 12 is 4, which is below the minimum, so the correction is +5. On a real unit the FMGC computes this from the aircraft's weight and the crew can overwrite it. No weight is loaded here, so 135 is representative and not a computed figure: a VLS of 130 kt plus 5. For scale, Airbus quotes a final approach speed of 136 kt for the A320-200 at its 66 t maximum landing weight, and a lighter aeroplane needs less. Why it deserves attention here: runway 09 has a landing distance available of 1494 m, and speed is what you carry down the runway. Energy grows with the square of speed, so 5 kt extra on 135 is more than 7 percent more energy to stop. The field would accept it without complaint.

The TDZE + 200 rule of thumb used for a CAT I ILS at Heathrow does not work here. Runway 09's threshold is at 19 ft, so it would give about 220 ft, while the ILS chart publishes a CAT C OCA of 540 ft (OCH 521) at a 2.5% climb gradient and 430 ft (411) at 3.0%. Airbus places the A320 in Approach Category C. This exercise uses the 2.5% figure, and the lesson is that the number comes off the chart. RADIO stays empty: the FCOM describes that field for CAT II and CAT III approaches, and the UK AIP says London City is not suitable for lower than standard Category I operations. As for LDG CONF, the FCOM makes FULL the default landing configuration and also inhibits speedbrake extension with the flaps in configuration FULL. If the speedbrakes are out when FULL is selected, they retract automatically and stay in until the lever is reset. The lever does nothing for you once the flaps are at FULL, so the energy has to be sorted before then.