PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Autopilot and 500 feet AGL?
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Old 9th April 2006 | 02:08
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Old Smokey
 
Joined: Jun 2004
Posts: 1,843
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From: Australia
Unless it's a company SOP or compliance with your local regulatory authority's requirements, it will all come back to the degree of redundancy associated with your Auto-Pilot.

You did mention the LEFT command auto-pilot, which would infer to me that you're engaging a single, no backup system, thus, there's no automatic redundancy if it should fail. Perfectly OK at higher altitudes where you can safely intervene within within a few seconds if failure occurs, but not so acceptable at low level.

Aircraft such as the B777 have a single Auto-Pilot switch, which engages a single A/P, but has the other 2 A/P's standing by to take over if internal logic cross checking indicates that the primary A/P is acting spuriously.

Regards,

Old Smokey
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