Page 25 - Volume 14 Number 4

the Sperry name) or CWS (Control Wheel Steering, the abbreviation for the King and Collins nomenclature) button and manually maneuver the airplane to the pitch and roll attitude that you desire, then release the button. Voila, look there! The AP starts holding the new attitude. It’s almost like having an invisible co-pilot that you direct, “Here, take the airplane and hold it for me, will you?”
As a side note, most of these systems will hold a bank angle between 30 and 60 degrees. But if 5 degrees or less is requested, the system rolls wings level, reads the heading from the HSI and holds that heading ... even though the heading bug may be nowhere near that heading. That means that there is no rush to get the heading bug under the lubber line and select the FD’s HDG mode. Even with the rudder and ailerons not perfectly trimmed, the existing heading will be maintained perfectly.
Don’t misunderstand what I am writing: My use of the AP alone without being coupled to the FD is quite rare indeed! There may be only one flight in a typical year on which this occurs. For giving lower-altitude aerial tours, however, how fine it is! Let me explain.
I had used the normal AP/FD combination to climb, level off, track to our next waypoint – the Meteor Crater southwest of Winslow (the INW VOR) – and descend as we neared this site. I muted/disabled the TAWS (Terrain
Awareness and Warning System) so that it would not be yelling at us incessantly as we flew near the ground. (If you don’t know how to do this in your airplane, please learn the procedure ASAP!) I leveled off about 1,000 feet AGL. We were now in HDG and ALT mode with the flight director bars in view, being followed by the AP. As we flew abeam the crater, I wanted to make a clockwise turn around it. Instead of moving the heading bug – and doing it again and again and again as the turn progressed – I merely reached down to the pedestal and rotated the turn knob clockwise out of its center detent. Doing this turned off the HDG mode automatically. With no lateral mode to follow, the FD command bars retracted out of view. Now we were in the “uncoupled” lateral mode of AP operation: The AP was still flying (and even holding our altitude in the vertical mode) but no longer following any FD bank commands. By regulating how far I rotated the turn knob on the pedestal, I could easily control bank angle and thereby the radius of the turn. Also, keep in mind that speed plays a role in turn radius so by setting power appropriately that was another tool I used to create a proper circle around the crater.
When we had finished oohing and aahing our way around the crater, I then set the GPS for the town of Kayenta (07V) at the south end of Monument Valley and returned to NAV mode to track there. The engagement of NAV brought the FD bars back into view. I pitched up using the rotary pitch wheel on the AP controller,
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APRIL 2020
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 23