Aero-Tips!

A good pilot is always learning -- how many times have you heard this old standard throughout your flying career? There is no truer statement in all of flying (well, with the possible exception of "there are no old, bold pilots.")

Aero-News has called upon the expertise of Thomas P. Turner, master CFI and all-around-good-guy, to bring our readers -- and us -- daily tips to improve our skills as aviators. Some of them, you may have heard before... but for each of us, there will also be something we might never have considered before, or something that didn't "stick" the way it should have the first time we memorized it for the practical test.

Look for our daily Aero-Tips segments, coming each day to you through the Aero-News Network.

Aero-Tips 10.06.06

I think we've rounded a corner in the way most instrument pilots view autopilots. When I first earned my instrument rating very few piston airplanes had any sort of autopilot. In airplanes equipped with an autopilot it was pretty much ignored during training, and verboten during an FAA checkride. Pilots were expected to juggle all the balls of IFR flight while hand-flying all the way. Autopilots were considered a crutch for the inexpert pilot.

The first autopilot-equipped aircraft I ever flew was a Cessna 182RG I used for my initial CFI practical test... the examiner asked me how to turn it on as we returned to the airport, and when I did (causing a rapid roll-over because I hadn't set the heading bug) he shrugged it off because, I later learned, he didn't know how to use it either.

A new look

Today an airplane isn't considered "serious" for IFR unless it has a three-axis autopilot coupled to a GPS for en route navigation and approach systems for close-in work. More and more pilots say they simply won't fly IFR without an autopilot. This is in part due to the increasing complexity of personally flown IFR airplanes -- GPSs are far more time-consuming than the tune-and-forget VOR/ILS system -- the higher performance (and quicker departure from flight path) of modern, slick airplanes, and the fact that many pilots fly in far worse weather than was the norm even in commercial operations a couple decades ago. Flown like this, autopilots are pretty much a necessity for cockpit workload management.

I'm firmly in the camp that a pilot should depend solely on an autopilot, but that he or she should never let an autopilot take him/her somewhere he/she could not comfortably hand-fly. I'm also a staunch proponent of using the autopilot when distracted by cockpit chores or a high-workload environment. Balancing hand flying vs. autopilot skills is becoming one of the biggest challenges of IFR currency.

But there is a growing population of pilots who feel that it's insane to fly IFR without an autopilot, and use the autopilot almost all the time, freeing themselves up to better monitor the flight operation.

My question for readers: do you consider an autopilot to be a required item for IFR flight? And if such is the case, would losing the autopilot in flight be grounds to divert to improved weather conditions, or even to declare an emergency? Please use the "Discuss this topic" link to let me know what you think.

Aero-tip of the day: Know how, and when, to use an autopilot.

FMI: Aero-Tips