I’m feeling quite pleased having kind of got autopilot to work, but wanted to ask if there are subtleties I’m missing.
What I’ve done is mapped 3 autopilot settings to some HOTAS keys:
Toggle Altitude Autopilot
Toggle Master Autopilot
Use Nav Autopilot
And in a nutshell, I settle down on my flight path, trim flight level, then hit all three switches. And it seems to work! I’ve been sweetly heading across the Bay of Biscay (without intervention) for well over an hour now…
What is the extent of autopilot, is is pretty much ‘keep going that way’?
Should this work in Career Mode? I struggled when I tried to use it there. Thanks.
I see you are flying in a VisionJet. You might want to explore the autopilot panel in the cockpit. Some other functions you may want to try are HDG or Heading hold mode and NAV or NAV/GPS hold mode. A popular binding is Increase Decrease Heading bug. There is a lot that the AP can do so maybe try a few new functions then ask some more questions?
Might be a silly question, but how is heading hold meant to work?
I set the desired heading using the hdg knob, turn the plane to within a degree or two of the heading I’ve set, enable heading hold and enable autopilot master. I see the AP and HDG indicators at the top of the MFD, the plane will typically bank violently to the left and spiral towards the ground unless I stop it.
Not sure if I’m doing something wrong or whether this is a bug.
I’ve tried this on the cesena and G36, amongst others.
Not a silly question and welcome aboard! What you are describing is not the expected response. What you might try next from either a shallow cruise climb or straight and level flight, is to simply engage the A/P on the 172 or G36, and see what happens next. The pitch angle should be maintained as well as the current heading. Anything else means something is wrong with either the sim or your controller(s) set-up. If the A/P response is as expected, try engaging HDG mode to see if a turn is commanded to the selected heading. The bank angle should not be extreme. Good luck and let us know how it goes.
@SofaJockey I’d say you want to learn how to set your heading bug and engage HDG mode, as well as setting your altitude bug, engaging ALT mode (to hold altitude) and FLC mode (to change altitude). To me this is the basic operation of autopilot, you want it to hold altitude and heading. In order to do that you need to tell it what heading and altitude you want to hold, which is what the "bug"s are for.
Nav mode you want to avoid, that requires learning to program a flight plan and would be the next step up in complexity when learning autopilot, IMO
