HC
Interesting theory of how the autopilot can trap you and initiate a chain of events that can rapidly get out of control!! Does this not emphasise my point of there now being a disconnect between "piloting" and "systems management".
You can be excellent at setting up and using the autopilot to its best but if it has properties that can basically stop the a/c flying, as DB explained, and your hand flying skills are not refreshed enough to recognise and then correct the displacement from safe flight you are in trouble fairly rapidly
If you were used to hand flying you would see the system is not doing what it should and manually remedy it before it went too far! I flew the SAR Seaking with a simplex let down to auto hover - a very good piece of kit but on still flat calm nights it sometimes needed watching carefully with encouragement to help it along!! This was easy as I also had to demonstrate, to the trainers, that I could fly the profile manually.
Weren't there instances in the early days of the Airbus where pilots were saying "what is the a/c doing now" as some part of the autopilot took over without them realising!
HF