Kaypam, from what you say about control movements, don't worry, you will get used to it.
The control movements can seem weirdly small until you get used to it. For taxiing, take the brakes off and you will normally start to move. If not you advance the thrust levers say a quarter of the available arc and as soon as you see the start of movement, you put them back to idle. Now you will taxi.
If you ever need to make fine adjustments to thrust levers, "walk" them against each other; twist your hand left and right to move each lever at a time by a small amount.
Reducing the pitch if the AP drops out 800' below the level. Gentle pressure on a conventional control column, not a push or even a movement, just gentle pressure.
On Airbus FBW on my initial type rating NOBODY could tell me how to use the side-stick. Even though I asked my TRE and several others, neither they or anybody could tell me. I eventually taught myself after seeing a film of a pilot operating the joystick in a Tornado (military fast jet):
On Airbus FBW, the attitude will stay where it was until a further input is received. So in your level-off scenario push the side-stick forwards against the centring spring one very brief forward push of about 20% of the full travel and immediately let the side-stick return to central. So just a small nudge or jab or bump against the spring, lasting half a second and then centre. So the action is nudge-release in half the time it takes to say that phrase. This will lower the nose a small amount and the FBW will hold the aircraft at this new attitude. If it was not enough, nudge-release again. Same applies in roll. That is how to make very small fine adjustments to the attitude of an Airbus FBW.
Re instruments, I agree, indications are too small for a given deviation or are badly designed, and this is why raw data flying is such a challenge. I remember finding NDB tracking in a PA28 to be very difficult because the NDB needle was on one dial and the heading bug was on another, and there was no bug for the NDB track - you had to remember what it was. One had to continually compare the needle with the heading instrument, and parallax and misreading could occur. Also, you were flying an aircraft that never stayed where you put it, so you were busy hand flying and continually correcting the aircraft and tracking a non bugged NDB needle, it was quite common for the NDB to drift more than 5 degrees out. When I later flew the Dash 8, you could overlay the NDB needle, the NDB track bug and the compass rose all on one instrument and suddenly NDB tracking was a piece of piss ! Instead of having to remember the NDB track and look at a different instrument to read what the heading was and then go back to the NDB instrument, all you had to do was glance at the one composite overlay. You did not even have to read any values, you could see at a glance if the NDB needle was under the track bug, and if it was just one degree out one side, you clicked the AP heading bug towards it by one degree. Really easy.
I have always found LOC and G/S displays to be too limited. By the time you can see a deviation, it is quite a large error. With my engineer's hat on, I would redesign the display so the markers were in two halves. One half would move as they currently do, the other half would move over its whole range of the display for say 1/4 of a degree LOC or 50' G/S - much more sensitive and a large movement for a small deviation - so you would be able to see a deviation before it became too big. The other half would display as it does now. A lot of the time the sensitive marker would be pegged on one extreme or the other, but when you had captured the LOC and G/S they would come off the stops, and a perfect ILS would see all the bugs centred.
(I should qualify that I am referring to the ILS markers on the PFD, not the navigation ILS beam bar display)
Last edited by Uplinker; 1st Dec 2020 at 10:55.