Autoland and realism

[XWRed5 0]

> Why would it be more stressful and difficult when the autopilot does everything and you only need to watch?I wrote a big long response to this thread a while back and after much editing I came to the conclusion it was long winded, unnecessarily complex and my generalisations were becoming misleading.However, a large part of that response was that irrespective of what approach aid you are using or what feature of the autopilot you have engaged, you and only you are responsible for the aircraft. It's not acceptable to lay in a hospital bed and say "it's not my fault gov, it was an autoland".Consequently when the autopilot (and any automated system) is engaged the pilots must monitor what it's doing and take control if it doesn't do what you want. In flight you can give the autopilot quite a bit of slack, the Airbus seems to worry greatly about comfort and can be very slow to react to FCU inputs, this can be a bit disconcerting for a while but you get used it. When you're thousands of feet in the air it really doesn't matter if it's not quite spot on, you'll live. That being said, it's an immensely capable autopilot, I've seen it handle very bad turbulence with nonchalance, it did a very good job, it just has its quirks.When doing an autoland the autopilot has to get your 50+ tonnes of metal on the ground at the beginning of a mile or so of concrete that is only 45m wide. To make matters worse you're going at 150mph and there's a fair chance you can't see very much. As such the margin for error is greatly reduced. Even doing a full CAT IIIB autoland with no decision height doesn't absolve the pilots of the responsibility of getting the aircraft on the runway safely.Your assertion that we "only need to watch" would be true if we weren't the ones that would die if it went wrong and were then subsequently blamed, sued and generally brutalised in the media.As an FO in the airline I fly for I'm only allowed to autoland in CAT I conditions or better, as such I could see the runway clearly. Nevertheless the last few hundred feet I was constantly watching what the autopilot did and asking myself "would I do that?". Often the answer is "no" and I would have to then decide if the autopilot was doing it wrong or just differently. Going round those two questions throughout the last few feet, the flare, touchdown and rollout was very mentally intensive and stressful, it's much easier just to do it.When doing an autoland in weather worse than CAT I the Captain is handling the aircraft and I monitor the aircraft systems. The Captain is going through exactly the same questions but he doesn't have the luxury of seeing the runway, only the instruments. He has to make the very difficult and time pressured decision of "is the autopilot going to kill us?" and take the appropriate action.I've never had to abandon an autoland but I've seen two occasions when at very low altitude (one during the flare) the aircraft has made a break for the terminal building and the Captain has had to disconnect the autopilot and finish off the landing manually. Both were in worse than CAT I conditions but we were visual by about 100ft.Hope this answers your question, the public perception of the autopilot is that it is a faultless piece of machinery that always works and always does as it's told. In reality it's a very reliable piece of kit that will fail in the most subtle way when you need it the most. A such we treat it with suspicion and when it's flying the aircraft near the ground the safety margins are much smaller than usual and our comfort zone becomes very small, we get twitchy, nervous and mentally very busy ... life is much easier if we just do it ourselves.Hope this helps,Ian

[brucek 38]

That's an excellent response, Ian.Although I don't fly anything large and complex enough to have autoland capability, I can't imagine how intimidating that must feel like. When I'm PIC and I let another pilot do the landing, I'm always anticipating to take-over if something might go wrong, and I expect that letting a computer handle it that you can't interact with as much as another pilot sitting alongside, must be hard. I know that those airline pilots that I have met and know well all hate the autolanding. But I can also see how the 2-D modeling on a sim can make manual landings seem harder, and most of us simmers haven't had to put in the thousands of hours of manual flight, so in some respects the sim makes the autoland seem (unrealistically) easier. Of course, no-one gets sued, loses their license, or gets killed if it was to fail in the sim either :)Bruce.

[jfri 42]

Good amswer I from what I have understood I might very well skip the autoland without feeling that I make the flying less realistic.By doing it yourself do you mean completely disengage the autopilot at DH? Or maybe using some features of the autopilot for example autothrottle?

[XWRed5 0]

Absolutely, ILS (with Land3 annunciated) until you're comfortable then full disconnect of all the automatics (all of them) for a manual landing.When to disconnect is up to you, 1000ft is a fair average.Don't forget, if the weather's good we sometimes hand fly the whole approach too. The LevelD 767 flies nicely, it can be a real pleasure.Hope this helps,Ian

[clayton4115 56]

i know a 767 Captain and he told me 100% of the time he does an ILS approach if the airport is capable of ILS.These days they arent many airports where ILS is not available.

[Mike S KPDX 597]

>I don't think you guys know this, but just because the>apporoach is visual doesn't mean you can't tune in the ILS and>fly the plane that way... I do it all the time in RL, just as>guidance, it doesnt hurtI know it,know it well, that is why I stated "... ATC initiated". This also eliminated pilot requested ILS procedure. During visual, you can tune any nav radio to any nav aid you like, no problem.