In article
,
says...


A recent post regarding technology made me curious about something

The question for other pilots: on a 3 or 5 hour XC, do you let the
transistors do the work, or do you mostly fly the airplane from
"Clear" up to idle cut off?

. I'm guessing that 80% of the time I'm doing a cross country I
carefully trim the airplane and hand fly it -- bits of pushing and
pulling, twisting and turning, to keep the airplane from meandering
too far off course. the autopilot actually flies better than I do -- I
suspect that's true for most of us, I'm guessing the RMS error of the
a/p's course error is a degree or so and it mostly keeps the needles
centered on an ILS: it pays better attention than I do. Never the
less, I like manual controlling the airplane and mostly do that..

What do YOU do?

Did all my IR training hand-flying, and do recurrent training the same
way, however single-piilot IFR I feel it is important to use the
autopilot, particularly on longer trips (because you will fly to a
better standard) or in locations like the East coast where you are
likely to get a lot of routing changes. If I do hand fly, then I am
mentally prepared to go into AP mode at any time iif something comes
along to iincrease workload.

For me, AP use does not induce boredom, nor does it reduce the sense of
accomplishment in completing a flight IFR uneventfully.