Hi, all, I’m having a lot of trouble getting the autopilot to work correctly with the Islander - I’ve been using the Logitech multifunction panel to operate the autopilot in the other planes I fly, but since having problems with the BN-2 autopilot, I’ve tried just running it through the MSFS interface to remove that piece of the puzzle, but am still running into problems.
Specifically, I’m finding that when in climb mode, the aircraft sometimes stops climbing, and the vertical speed mode refuses to kick in.
I’ve been flying lots of other planes in MSFS with no problems with working the autopilot, but it may just be the case that none of the other planes I fly happen to have the KAP140 autopilot.
Usually what I do is set heading to runway heading, set the altitude to my initial altitude, then set the v/s to something reasonable, take off, enable autopilot with heading/alt/vs, then switch to nav mode once cleared, autopilot levels off at the desired initial altitude, and then when cleared higher, reset to the next altitude, plug in a v/s, and I’m good to go.
What’s the specific order of modes that I should be using with the KAP 140? I feel as though I must be missing something really, really basic here.
Also having trouble with getting heading mode to take me in the right direction - have seen that others have apparently had the heading mode issue because of not using the D key to set the gyro to mag heading, but I’m pretty sure I’ve always had the assist option enabled to not need to do that, and it’s still enabled. Sometimes the autopilot just refuses to take direction from either the heading bug OR the GPC nav.
Thanks in advance for any help the community can offer!
Edit: I managed to get the plane to climb to cruise just now, but then when I tried to descend, I couldn’t figure out the order of operations to set a lower altitude and then descend to the lower altitude at a desired speed. The KAP140 lacks a VS button (mine does, anyway), so it’s not apparent when a v/s is set, or how much it’s set to. The ARM button isn’t something I’m used to dealing with either - that could be the root cause of all my confusion here.
Regards,
Joe