Originally Posted by
FlyerJosh
Some questions that come to mind:
What type of aircraft were you training on?
What were you doing hand flying so much during training?
What type of autopilot experience do you have?
What was your PM doing when you were flying? You should be calling for EVERYTHING before reacting. It's their job to set it up for you... just slow down and remember that nothing needs to happen immediately. Only two things will kill you in a short period of time- explosive decompression and a cabin fire. Everything else is a fly the plane, keep things upright, slow down, think, and work your way through the appropriate checklist.
Was at Piedmont, so Dash 8...I do have autopilot experience, but none with a flight director, save for 3 hours in a c340 and 4 hours in a cj3, all while using the a/p.
As far as in the sim, I was told to try to do as much as I possibly could do as pilot flying because the pilot monitoring had too much other stuff to worry about, especially to be setting the fd for me. Perhaps I just tried to do too much? I dont know. On approach, procedure and callouts were black and white. PF sets app mode, pm sets altitudes. Once on approach I can fly the approach, and really the flight director makes flying an approach really easy.
Looking back, it was stuff like calling 4 for 5 altitude select, but then forgetting to set vertical speed or ias, or I would wheel in vert speed, nothing happens, try it again, it goes too far wouldn't get to my desired setting, so now I'm screwing around with the fgc while hand flying, trying to get the fd to tell me the correct info while trying to descend to a published altitude after crossing a iaf, for example. That kind of thing burned me, especially when we got to single engine flying. Really that is it. The flight director got in my head so much it really did become a burden for me.