get ready to be scared then. I cancelled a flight up to Sydney last sunday because the A/P was out on the king air. No way am I going into that place at rush hour without being able to hand the plane to george for a few minutes to take a note or do a chore.
Words of a true aviation professional.
As far as autopilot usage while IFR goes, I would like to believe that we can all hand fly all the various types of instrument approaches down to their respective minimums correctly and proficiently without any type of aid - flight director, autopilot, etc. If a pilot cannot do that, then he needs to get more training or quit flying IFR - period.
The autopilot is designed to be a pilot aid, not a pilot's crutch. That being said, aircraft owners spend great sums of money to provide redundancies for nearly every system on our aircraft - multi engines, dual this, triple that, etc., etc. Here's a question. When we hand fly an ILS approach down to minimums, what redundancy to we have in case of "pilot failure"? In aircraft with two-pilot crews, if the PNF is doing his job,will he be able to effectively take the controls in the case of a botched approach by the PF? Obviously not, and even if he was able to, is solid IFR at 200' AGL and with a 700 fpm sink rate the time and place to be making those types of changes?
Personally, I believe that we should hand fly all of the "high and mid" minimums approaches we can, but when the ceiling gets below 500 feet and the visibility gets below a mile couple it up and let the autopilot do its thing. We then become the backup to the autopilot and we have injected an element of redundancy into the operation. In that rare case that the autopilot messes up and gets us sideways to the world, relief is only a click of the autopilot release button away. In the mean time, you have been able to watch and monitor the approach while covering the controls. If it ever becomes necessary, the transition is both instantaneous and seamless.
Here is another item to consider…
We frequently use contract pilots in our operation. A while back, I had the opportunity to fly with one who subscribed to the theory that "real" pilots don’t use autopilots. It was his leg and we were departing one of the LA basin airports. It was one of those “minimum VFR" days and every Tom, Dick, and Harry was out in his little Cessna or Piper. It was a busy day and this guy did a masterful job of hand flying the departure procedure and working with ATC. The problem was that he had his head buried in the cockpit flying the airplane and not looking outside. It was the last time we ever used that guy.
There are other times when we probably have no business hand flying our high performance aircraft. For example, VFR weekends in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area or L.A. basin below 10,000' MSL. Can you really hand fly your high performance aircraft while maintaining an adequate watch for traffic or are you one of those guys who puts 100% faith in his TCAS or ATC?
I'm glad there there a few guys out there who are good enough to never need or use an autopilot. I'm not one of those guys.
) and while I do appreciate the automation (most of the time), I fear that a lot of folks in the next generation will not have a good basis in hand flying. I'm already seeing it somewhat with the RJ guys, particularly those that did some kind of Ab Initio or paid for their first jobs types. Most of them can program the FMC like a secretary taking notes and twice as fast, but cringe anytime the AP is disengaged.
