Although I have flown this aircraft loads of times before, I have never encountered this issue previously.
I flew a fairly normal flight from Cardiff to Marseille in the original version default A320 (not the newer V2). It followed the GPS line as expected. When I arrived, I was too high and needed to turn around and approach again. However, the plane just decided to go around and around and around in circles. All this time its heading had the Dot of Doom on the autopilot display showing me it was in managed LNAV mode. I kept vainly trying to wrestle control using the heading knob. It just ignored me. I tried every weird click combination I could think of to try and put it into “selected heading” mode but it would NOT do it. Eventually I set the mouse indicator to Legacy rather than Lock, and by clicking when it showed the appropriate arrow, it made it do it.
So I flew a distance away, turned round and came towards the ILS signal again, which was reading on the PFD. I was below the glideslope, coming in at a good angle to capture the ILS. However… when I hit the “approach” control, the plane just decided to forget all about the ILS, and started swinging back to my GPS track - taking me towards the airport, but at a totally wrong heading, behaving as if it was navigating by LNAV again.
So my questions are:
- What is the correct way to click the Heading control on the autopilot panel to get it to go to “selected heading” mode when you are using Lock rather than Legacy?
- Why did the plane ignore the ILS when I activated Approach?
- Is there a way to force the autopilot to ignore LNAV entirely and just go with numerical parameters in the control panel?