Bluefishbeagle, I have approximately 1200 hours in the Rice Rocket, sounds like Con-pilot has a lot of time in some of the older models that were pretty weak on power, like the L or G models, the autothrottle problem I assume is the Bendix FC unit problem, I had some on the J I started on in Albuquerque, they would idle at various speeds and would occasionally quit.
Once we changed to the Woodward units, life was much better, as others have mentioned, it's not the kind of airplane you get checked out by taking a spin around the pattern, I received proper flight and ground training courtesy of the nice folks at Houston Hobby FSI.
I enjoyed the airplane tremendously, the weak points back then was the Bendix Auto pilot, plastic and the plastic wind screen, although it was originally suspected that icing was a problem for the MU2, I operated the aircraft in some of the worst winter conditions a person could imagine without a problem.
I was lucky enough to fly some updated machines in recent years like the Marquise and Solitaire, the latter being my choice as a personal dream aircraft, the short models having some different takeoff and landing techniques, but I have heard some of this problem can be fixed by moving the batteries to the other end.
I would say a person needs to update the A/P if it isn't working well, but it's a great airplane, miss it a lot.
Nice posts by Ag2A320.
