Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
I don't know about the autopilot, but yes, much of test flying is very dull and mundane. The only reason that dull and mundane is not easy, is that immense precision of hitting the test point right on is still required.
I have noticed which flying under mentoring from formal test pilots, and in some cases, flying right seat PIC to a formal test pilot flight test, is that the best test pilots are "unconsciously competent" at simply flying the plane. The flying part has to just "be there", so that the actual objective of the flight is foremost in what's going on. I have, as the sole test pilot, sometimes have just needed a few hours of building the competence with a new type, before actually flying it for the purpose of demonstrating design compliance.
I've flown on countless hours of flight testing, and every single test pilot I encountered had excellent "stick and rudder" skills to the point where - as Pilot DAR suggests - the 'flying' of the aircraft was almost subconscious, the attention was on the detail of getting the test point correct.
One of the most impressive flight test feats I ever witnessed was when we were flight testing the 747-8. The test requirement was to fly straight and level, but with a 20 degree yaw and hold it there for 60 seconds (they had a screen in the pilots field of vision that showed the amount of yaw). We weren't very high (14k IIRC, over a ~4k ground level) - low enough that I wondered how much altitude we'd need to recover if it got away from the pilot. We did the condition twice so they could test the effect of the 20 deg yaw both ways. It was painfully obvious that the 747 didn't like doing that (I wondered what it must have looked like to someone on the ground), and on the first condition the pilot struggled to hold the correct yaw - enough so that he apologized for a 'sloppy' test point. But he also learned quickly - the second condition he held the yaw right on (and offered to re-do the first condition but it was deemed unnecessary).
I also recall a pre-flight before going up to do a number of stall conditions. They were using a trailing cone for ambient (static) pressure - one of the test engineers told the pilot who was going to fly the conditions to 'avoid using rudder to recover' from the stalls since a big rudder swing could shear off the trailing cone. The pilot turned to the test engineer and stated - in a very 'mater of fact' tone, that he would do what he need to do to recover from the stall, if that meant a rudder swing that sheared off the trailing cone, so be it...