Originally Posted by
Nick Thomas
I was wondering if it was possible to hand fly Concorde when she was supersonic?
I should let the pilots on this thread answer, really,
But I would say
yes, just tedious, and needing the PF to pay far more attention minute-to-minute to all the various basic flight parameters, and
fly them, rather than just
monitor the autopilot doing the job.
Therefore would the failure of one or both autopilots mean that you would have to divert to the nearest airport?
Basically, no.
The autopilots were quite reliable, and what's more, they were essentially independent, so the probability of
both failing during the same flight was pretty remote.
If one dropped out in flight for whatever reason, you'd engage no. 2 and continue.
The only situation where losing both autopilots within a minute or so of each other would be critical, would be during a Cat.III autoland, and just before that you'd run an autotest of both computers. The probablity of then losing both almost at the same time during those last few minutes was in the order of 10E-09 or less, and indeed never happened.
Also how long after takeoff would it normally be before engaging the autopilot?
Can one of our pilot friends oblige?
CJ
PS I should add, that normally only one of the two autopilots was engaged, with the other powered but inactive, and IIRC, with AP1 active, AP2 would refuse to engage until you disengaged AP1.
Only in LAND mode could both APs be engaged at the same time, with normally no.1 flying and no.2 as a "hot" standby.
The system was referred to as "fail active", in that no.2 would already be synchronised to what no.1 was doing, and would take over totally automatically, without a hiccup (except an "oh merde" from the pilots, probably).
Quoting from memory.