Originally Posted by
FlyingStone
I'm always fascinated why some airlines prefer to have its pilots fly manually in extremely marginal weather conditions with HUD rather than use autoland, where available.
Do you perhaps know why your employer chose to do so?
Can't speak for all operators but our maggots don't have the CAT III auto land capability, only CAT II, but we do have a HUD. Using AIII mode you can get to CAT IIIA minima (175/125/75m and 50' vs 300/125/75m and 100' ish) and 75m for T/off (on certain runways). The only cost to the operator is a training cost (a few sim sessions), whereas if they want to get to CATIII auto land capability there'd be, what I would assume would be, a large engineering cost PLUS a training cost.
I'm not a huge fan of hand flown CAT IIIA, for the reason that the captain is now not only a captain but an autopilot too and the F/O is out of the loop somewhat (no HUD on the right). If I'm sure I'll get in on CAT II minima, I'll auto land. If it's marginal I'll use the HUD in AIII to get the lower minima. Having said that, they're easy to fly, AIII mode is very capable, hyper accurate and you could teach your 10 year old to fly it well. Somewhere on this thread someone said their company uses the autothrottle, we don't in this case.