After several weeks of flying this great aircraft I just have one thing which I would really love to see improved.

And that is the autoflight pitch behaviour on VNAV, FL CHG and (sometimes) GS. I really appreciate that the aircraft is adhering very exactly to vertical and speed profiles, but  I personally find that it achieves that by doing quite abrupt/jerky adjustments on the pitch axis which one wouldnt expect from such a heavy aircraft. Sometimes it just let fall the nose quite rapidly, sometimes adjustments are like  "lower nose - stop - lower nose - stop....."  instead of a steady smooth and slow adjustment. Climbs/Decents sometimes are constant pitching up and down quite rapidly.....a bit immersion killing for me as it doesnt give the feeling of being in such a heavy aircraft.....

Would be great If that could be improved, but maybe its just me....What do you think ?

best regards

 

 

I have to say, I haven't notices any real swings in pitch.  No different than the NGX, which seems to do this more.  Tbh, I think the real birds will do this if you aren't handling it properly.  Pax just simply don't notice it like you do in a sim.

I've read that RW pilots will switch to V/S to smooth out transitions.

I've been told by the pros to avoid V/S.  Interesting.

Regardless, for every dozen complements on the A/P behavior there's a complaint.  I have to agree with Chris, the B744 is not a plane that you can sit back and idly watch, it requires active pilot interaction during all changes in flight regime.  Fly the airplane and you'll find that she is as graceful as she is elegant.

Sorry, I am not talking about flight regime changes. I am talking about the graceful queen being on approach fully established on the GS and the AP suddenly letting the nose fall down several degrees in an instant (for example) . So you better have the seat belts fastened.....

We do tend to avoid V/S because it does not have the speed protections VNAV and FLCH have.

Having said that, V/S can be useful for small altitude changes, capturing the GS from above, and in some cases, when you have several tightly spaced altitudes in a climb or descent, sometimes V/S can be a smoother operation for passenger comfort over VNAV, with the power trying to go to THR REF even for small changes. Sometimes out of England or Frankfurt, you can have a lot of these small steps as you are threaded out of the area.

But as a general rule, Dan is correct, we do avoid it as a normal pitch mode in climb or descent, but it does have its specialty uses from time to time...

3 hours ago, Suniram said:

So you better have the seat belts fastened.....

Several degrees of pitch change are not noticeable,  as already mentioned by Chris, things like this jump out of the screen at you in a simulator but in the real world you might not notice anything.

I would never use V/S for a climb without close observation.  No stall protection with that mode.  I think it just depends on the operator and/or pilot.  I tend to use V/S during descent when I'm not getting down fast enough on glidepath. IOW, I'm slowing to 240 knots but the plane is well above 10,000 and speed brake isn't slowing very much.  Like to capture the path faster, or a changeover when a STAR puts you a little high between waypoints.  I find that sometimes VNAV kinda gets lost, especially in the NGX and I revert to V/S to get on track. 

Overall though I don't use it all that much. Like I said, it's nice to use V/S to make minor adjustments.  I tend to find the VNAV in the 744 pretty smooth overall.  The NGX tends to lose its mind or get lost more often.