Page 23 - Volume 14 Number 4

The Autopilot’s
Aerial Tour Modeby Tom Clements
Just yesterday (I am writing this in mid-February 2020), I had the great pleasure of flying a “Flightseeing” tour of northern Arizona in Ron McAlister’s lovely 1984 B200 King Air. I have done this numerous times over the years in a multitude of airplanes, giving out-of-state visitors an aerial tour of our beautiful state, and the scenic wonders it encompasses. The Mogollon Rim above the town of Payson, Meteor Crater southwest of Winslow, Monument Valley on the Navajo Indian Reservation, Lake Powell and its Rainbow Bridge, the city of Page with its Navajo Bridge and Glen Canyon Dam, the Dragon corridor through the Grand Canyon’s Special Flight Rules area, then a landing at Grand Canyon airport. We took a taxi-van into the park and had a delicious lunch in the historic dining room of the El Tovar lodge on the south rim of the canyon. The return flight back to Phoenix’s Deer Valley Airport (KDVT) included a tour of Sedona’s red rock majesty. Wow!
The weather was perfect, no TFRs existed and Ron, his wife Donna, and our passengers were exemplary guests. What a delightful, fun day!
What made it especially easy for me and comfortable for the passengers was my use of the autopilot in modes that are very rarely utilized. In this particular King Air, the autopilot is the Sperry SPZ-4000, the digital version of the very popular SPZ-200A system. If you are flying one of these systems, a King KFC-300 or KFC-400, a Collins AP-105, 106 or 107, an APS-80 or some version of the APS-65, then most or all that I write here will
APRIL 2020
apply to your system, too. If you have a Century IV or a King KFC-250, then, sorry, but these techniques will not work as well for you.
In days of yore – say, 50 or more years ago in the 1960s and early 1970s – it was rare to see a flight director (FD) and an autopilot (AP) combined into one unit ... an integrated system. Instead, the autopilot – that almost all King Airs had – operated to control pitch, pitch trim, bank, and yaw via its four servos and its own control panel. The relatively few King Airs that also included a flight director – that could direct a pilot how much pitch and bank were needed to satisfy a particular flight condition by the movement of indicators displayed on the attitude indicator while hand-flying – had a separate control panel to program the desired parameters ... heading hold, altitude hold, Nav tracking, glideslope tracking, etc.
Today it is exceedingly rare to find a King Air without an integrated AP/FD system. One control panel selects the modes for both systems. Unlike in the earlier, separate, non-integrated systems, we can never have the autopilot tracking a Nav course while the flight director is providing heading information. Weird? A poor choice of modes? Sure! But is it possible in the non-integrated systems? Yes.
Most of us will have the flight director in Go Around (GA) mode, Heading mode and, probably, the Altitude Select mode activated before takeoff and displayed on the Attitude Director Indicator (ADI). When the integrated AP is turned on in the climb after 400 feet above liftoff,
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