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When I was learning to fly, one busy day my instructor and I were stuck waiting on a taxiway so he pulled up the autopilot and we had a play. One of the prefli
by 0xfaded 8y ago
When I was learning to fly, one busy day my instructor and I were stuck waiting on a taxiway so he pulled up the autopilot and we had a play.
One of the preflight checks is that the autopilot is disengaged for takeoff, but we did this after the checklist.
We took off with the autopilot set to something like 4000ft, making it want to climb at an impossible rate of climb. As a novice pilot it took me several seconds of fighting the controls to figure out what had happened, all the while with the stall horn blaring on takeoff. Scary lesson.
- magnetic 8y agoI'm a bit surprised about this didactic method: being close to stalling on take-off doesn't seem to be a very safe way to teach a lesson. I used to fly and during my license test we did get into a stalling exercise to force the plane to stall at a few thousand feet altitude. This was meant to learn the feeling of sudden drop and how to recover. There is something both thrilling and scary about transitioning so quickly from seeing the horizon to seeing only earth right in front of you approaching at a high rate of speed. Being in near-stall conditions close to the ground seems to me like a recipe for disaster.
- stouset 8y agoI believe he means the instructor was showing him various autopilot features before takeoff. During this sequence, they engaged the autopilot. When they went to take off, they neglected to disengage the autopilot (since doing so wasn’t on the checklist).