Flight directors

[jason_beall]

Hi all,

I had the experience this past weekend to attend the ATOP program (www.b737.com) at Continental Airlines in Houston, Texas. Included in the experience was 1.5 hours in the 737-300 sim. This program is specifically geared at wannabes so they can take their prospective career for a 'test-drive'.

This was my first experience flying with the flight director. The reason for this post is really to find out what percentage of the time practising pilots:

1)hand fly approaches using the flight director
2)hand fly approaches using raw data only
3)let the autopilot fly the approach

Also, what is the normal practise regarding auto-throttles?

Thanks,

-Jason

[Willit Run]

there are as many opinions about Flight Directors as anything else. I try to divide my time equally between coupled approachs, using the Flight Director and Raw Data.
If you solely use the flight director, There are times when you won't have it and you have do a raw data and you'll be out of practice, , and there are times that the flight director will give you the wrong information, thats why you MUST always cross reference your raw data when using the flight director!!

My thought on auto throttles, If your hand flying, turn the auto-throttles off. Why, they can be very sensitive and basically, your using two different brains to command the same plane.and they won't necessarily coincide with each other. The pitch factor with power changes can reak havoc with a hand flown approach, make it unstable, and frustrate the hell out of you!

[overstress]

I fly Airbus. What's a pitch/power couple?

[Denti]

It's really easy. If you're flying an aircraft with underslung engines, you get a pitch-up moment if you add thrust and a pitch-down moment if you pull back the TLs. The same is happening on the airbus, but you don't have to trim so you'll never feel it.

I try to fly at least 50% raw data approaches, e.g. without flight director and manually. The rest of the approaches are flown with flight director and most of them manually from the beginning of the final approach (ils or whatever). Autothrottle is off (or arm) whenever i fly manually with the exception of the takeoff, thats common sense and SOP.

[Tight Slot]

Overstress - "Whats a pitch/power couple?"

Thats because the Airbus has no power...

Get yourself some RB211's under those wings and see how the computers handle it.

Roger roll Discovery.

[longarm]

Don't know about little RB211's but it seems to do a very good job with a couple of Trents attatched !:)

[Tight Slot]

Fair point!

Yep, I think an A318 with Trent 900's either side, that would do nicely.

[Capt Claret]

Jason,

My observations within the company I work for (BAe146) are that the split between handflown raw data v flight director approaches is almost 50/50. Coupled approaches are only ILS. Most pilots seem to hand fly to 10,000' to try and keep their scan rate up.

IMHO, the biggest disadvantage of a flight director, is that in most cases it reduces the need for an effective instrument scan, thus self discipline is need to keeps one's scan effective.