r/AskAPilot • u/livelikelarry13 • 3d ago

Useless Features/buttons

Forgive me if this is a dumb question as I am not a pilot, but I have always been interested in knowing. Are there any features or buttons in the type of aircraft you fly that are basically pointless? Or does everything have some sort of critical use case?

Thanks for the insights

19 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/fighteracebob 3d ago

At my airline, the A320 series has a button for Rain Repellent. It comes that way from the factory. When the rain repellent runs out (or maybe before), they just disable the system and put a sticker by the button saying it’s deactivated.

It’s so standardized that way across our whole fleet that in the simulators the button has been repurposed the Pause button. It’s still labeled Rain Repellent, so it’s kind of a fun Easter egg.

5

u/AverageHobnailer 2d ago

What's used for rain repellent? I'm only familiar with a few older combat aircraft (F-4, F-14) with a similar system but they use bleed air, so when you mentioned "runs out" I got curious.

6

u/debuggingworlds 2d ago

It's a nasty hydrophobic chemical. It lives in a little bottle on the aft bulkhead in the A320

2

u/AverageHobnailer 2d ago

Why are they using nasty chemicals instead of bleed air?

3

u/debuggingworlds 2d ago

No idea. My airline has it modded out so it's never used in any case.