Pilot and ATC misunderstandings
An interesting occurence/incident happened to me recently flying a BE 20 single crew.
There is a little switch underneath the radio stack which slaves the flight director to either the captain or copilots side HDG bug. I overlooked this switch in my cockpit setup, with interesting results.....
On departure the SID calls for straight ahead to 3miles then a left turn to hdg 330. After taking off i engaged the autopilot and the aircraft started to turn, much to my bemusement. As I disengaged the autopilot to hand fly the correct heading, ATC calls me and says "maintain runway heading" in a slightly scolding tone. I took this as a rebuke for not sticking to the assigned runway heading on the SID, and continued to fly the departure with my tail between my legs. At 3 miles I turned left hdg 330 as per the SID, and on reaching the heading ATC says "say your hdg", to which I replied "330". ATC says " I told you to maintain runway heading " and so I then turned back onto runway heading feeling like a complete idiot. Only later did i realise the HDG mode was following the bug on the copilots side.
Luckily there was no conflict with other traffic but I just thought to myself how 2 people (me and ATC) whos first language is english can have an error in communication like that, imagine the difficulties faced by non english speakers.
Any thoughts /comments?? (Yes i will check that little switch under the radio stack next time...)