It´s Cannonball !!! 
You saw the film ??
What’s the film got to do with this?
If we followed the film we’d be racing to first parked in the car park of the (blue and white) Portofino Inn at Redondo beach, not LAX.
Seeeeedy…? 
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I take it the main ideas of the race is to promote healthy flying habits by using AP, that’s not what those trying to win it would go for. Those that want to win will fly all manual on either the Cap 10 or VL-3 period. Doesn’t that create an anti-pattern behavior considering the race recommends otherwise ?
What if we restrict the use of a manual aircraft to one take off / landing. That way the Cap 10, VL-3 can each be flown once. This will get people to rotate to other air crafts and use auto pilot more. It’s up to each pilot to decide when to fly manual, and when to go auto.
I guess most people would require anywhere between 7 - 9 stops to finish the trip, so we’ll see majority of the trip flown using AP aircrafts thereby promoting a more fun, healthy flying experience overall.
Or if you want to simplify the whole thing and make it really fair… Restrict the whole race to a single aircraft that has AP. Then in true Canon ball fashion all the balls would have the same color, and more interestingly you could even let everyone fly a turbo prop! 
Side note:
The other thing is since the above mentioned manual aircrafts have slightly quicker cruise speeds it’s pretty easy for a machine learning guy to capture images of the cockpit and use it to train an auto flight algorithm, that in turn controls the aircraft. You can that way make manual flight aircrafts fully automatic. I’m an machine learning guy myself and know I can code this up with a days work, and a few hours of training. You don’t even need ML to write an external auto pilot, you can do it with hardcoded rules too. PFD shows aircraft rolling 5 deg to the left, correct for it by applying movements to the right. It is easy to automate. So giving everyone AP in the first place would deter anyone from even bothering using automation to fly. . Unless you want a bunch of bots racing this canon ball race…
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If someone actually codes a machine learning algorithm to cheat in this event, they’re welcome to claim the top spot.
I really hope nobody takes this fun event I’m organizing that seriously. I’m putting this together for the community’s entertainment and to raise money for Shinji’s around-the-world flight. This isn’t the Tour de France.
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You can’t run a fair competition with just hopes, you do it with smart rules 
I’m fine with making rules like mandating the use of simair.io to validate the winner competed fairly. I draw the line at making rules to explicitly prevent someone from writing a machine learning algorithm specifically to cheat at this event. I expect the MSFS community to have some standards of honourable competition and good sportsmanship.
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I appreciate the vote of confidence in the community . As a techie amongst those in the community I had to highlight a weakness that existed.
Restricting the use to only AP was hence suggested to level the playing field. In a sense it’s never fair to a solo person having to run the marathon alone, while having two people split the load amongst themselves. Going AP takes off the advantage from that camp as well.
I’m not sure if this was mentioned, is someone going to live stream on that day or at least set up some sort of chat? It would be fun to be able to let everyone else know what the scenery and weather are like up in front. 
. Our better yet, for safety reasons, everyone else can let me know if my white nav light burns out. For safety reasons of course. 
If the race rules force pilots to swap aircraft then you’re risking delay due to the sim screwing up (not loading live weather, for example). I’d also call it immersion breaking.
And as for forcing AP use…personally, I’d like a race across the Rockies with an alt limit of 1,000 AGL. Use AP at your peril.
And if you can put together a ML autopilot that’ll navigate mountains why aren’t you working for Asobo? (Edit: Or NASA)
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Makes sense, the wages’ll be higher.
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Let’s not overstate the importance of autopilot. The vast majority of the flight will be flying straight and level, and most will be just sitting on a magenta line. A properly trimmed airplane needs hardly any correction. I can say this confidently as I’ve already flown the C152 across the country in about 28 hours (not consecutively) while fiddling with both the VORs and ATC.
If someone goes through the effort of making essentially a 3rd party AI autopilot, bless them, but that time that might be better spent studying meteorology
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I’m going to be livestreaming my entire run on Twitch (Twitch). Streaming isn’t mandatory, but I do encourage others to also stream their run and promote Shinji’s GoFundMe to your viewers.
I’m also going to setup a Discord server for this event where people can join a common voice chat room. Standby on that – I’ll post the details here when it’s ready.
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Flying manual without AP is going to be a bit like a leg workout, with no hands needed except for the occasional vertical trim adjustments 
At the end of this run I’m gonna get ripped legs from all the rudder correction to stay on course (on the magenta line)
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Or you could trim your rudder (CTRL-Num0/Enter)
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I have a Tenkeyless keyboard (No numpads)
I have rudder trims on the warthog joystick however but then ill end up with a swollen thumb
Update: Or create a keyboard macro to introduce a timed rudder oscillation
Perfectly vertical trim with keyboard macro running rudder oscillations = near AP
The rest of us would just remap to something else.
This reminds me of the old tall story about a NASA engineer and a Russian Space Agency engineer boasting to each other at a reception in the '70s. The NASA engineer brought out a pen that works in zero gravity (ink don’t flow in 0g) and went on about how complicated it was and how much it cost ($1m US each). The Russian was impressed and responded with
“Da, in Russia we use pencil.”
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I mean it’s just a no-brainer to setup a keyboard macro that oscillates the rudder, and keep that running forever … Cruise at 170+ and all the AP aircrafts will be left in the dirt.
Which is why I been saying lets allow only AP aircrafts in the first place. These manual aircrafts can be made almost AP in so many ways.
I’m just curious. Even if you oscillate the trims, wouldn’t the aircraft over time still end up way off course and pitch?
Oh you had to ask…
Once your aircrafts on the magenta line, that’s going straight without curves, and you have vertical trims corrected, you just need to oscillate your rudder in a timed fashion and you’ll never leave the magenta line. I been flying for hours only with rudder corrections.
The aircraft will keep swinging up and down vertically… but that will oscillate on it’s on without much of a variance…
So automate that rudder correction you got yourself AP in a way…
Wind however can screw up this stuff… but you get the idea.