I treated myself to the Carenado PA46 Mirage this weekend.

It is a very impressive and fun to fly plane. I'm loving it.

 

I set up a flight and programed in my destination in the Garmin 460,  take off, climb to altitude, level off and turn on the autopilot. Set it to maintain my current altitude and all goes well. It seeks out my course and flies it perfectly until about 3-4 mins into the flight and then the autopilot seems to have trouble maintaining altitude. Is starts slowly going up and down porpoising and it gradually becomes worse until we are climbing 4000'/min and decending 4000' /min. It stays on course but altitude is fluctuating drastically. The ride is making me air sick. 

 

What am I missing. I checked the manual, but don't see anything referencing the autopilot.  Anyone have the same problem with this aircraft, or is it something I am missing?

 

Rob

I don't own the PA46, but have many other Carenado aircraft.  I have never experienced the problem you describe except one time when I had leaned the mixture and cut the throttle too much and it was fighting for power to hold altitude.  More power = no porpoising.  Other than an incorrect power adjustment, I am at a loss for your problem.

 

John

Hello Comanche

I had a similar problem with my Carenado B58 Baron, at first no problem at all with the autopilot using it to climb or maintain altitude when suddenly a few days ago experienced porpoising and pitching using the autopilot and noticeable pitching when flying hands on. I deleted and re-installed the Baron but had the same problem again so I tried X plane's Baron B58 and had a similar problem although it held altitude it still kept porpoising, so I realized it had to be something I triggered myself. Sure enough I remembered while in the weather set up a few days before I had changed degree Fahrenheit to degree Celsius and I wondered if this affected the aircraft instruments, in fact when you hover over radio buttons before making your selection a pop describes the effects on aircraft systems and instruments, so I changed back, restarted X Plane and thankfully this solved the problem.

I would check this off your list first, good luck!

 

Loz

That makes sense since I was playing around with weather prior to this flight. I'll check it out later tonight and report back. Thanks for the tip.

 

Rob