Originally Posted by
Lord Spandex Masher
Not quite. Whilst the trim wasn't brilliant and caused a certain amount of porposing, especially close to the barbers pole, the reason for the climb after altitude capture was due to a lack of PE correction in altitude hold. An increase in speed caused a climb and vice versa, one of the reasons for lack of RVSM approval.
Correct. If you don't accelerate after level off then it holds the selected altitude just fine.
There are a number of ways to deal with it. You can set 100 low on the altsel as described by Lord Spandex above, you can manually select alt hold while in the capture mode when approx 100' below the set altitude (works best with low rates of climb), or you can just let it capture and accelerate and then re-arm the altsel and pitch back to it.
My main annoyance with the autopilot is its VS mode. When you select VS there's some delay between pushing the button and the final VS that gets set, so unless you have the VS nice and stable right where you want it, it's a bit of a lottery as to what you'll end up with. Not to mention that if in VS and you select F18, the aeroplane will balloon up as the autopilot servos are not powerful enough to hold the selected VS against the trim changes as the flaps run. Once they have run it might settle back to the original VS, or it might not. When you've come from a Dash 8 will give you what ever VS you set in fpm, the 146 system is a bit of a step backward.
The RJ fixes both of the above problems, but it doesn't seem to be as nice to hand fly for some reason.
As for redeeming features, it's airbrake makes it very versatile, it will slow down like a turboprop if you need it too.