OnCourse Software

For this flight I thought I would use option 3 and let my lady co-pilot take control of the AP.

Never again! You know what they say about women drivers?! Well, I never met one until to-day. Sometimes she did and sometimes she didn't if you know what I mean and after a lot of help from me along the way, we reached Bristol Approach. Now, I'm very familiar with this airport and she wasn't but I let her and approach get on with it. So after we missed it, I reported it and flew the missed approach myself.

Now, I knew that the 3500' the controllers gave me was too high at this airport to catch on the ILS so I ended up with a start to my glide slope from the correct altitude of 2,500' and landed it myself.

It was eventful to say the least but I can't help admitting I enjoyed it.

John

Sounds like you need to change your co-pilot.

What did she do wrong... as far as I'm concerned the CP is invaluable and never gets it wrong... he/she will do whatever ATC instruct then to do?

Hi Dave

I agree about the change in co-pilot. Especially now my wife's found out about her!

Two things mainly she did wrong. Although during the flight she was quick to respond to ATC, she was quite slow to action their orders, and on approach, she flew in completely the wrong direction so that five miles from runway 27 she was actually flying left at about 240 degrees.

Then we did a 'go around' with me flying and I got it down without the instrument approach which I would have prefered because there was a lot of low cloud about. As it happened, the runway came into view when I was at about 1250' and 2 miles out. The runway altitude is 622' at Bristol.

It was simply an experiment to see how a co-pilot would handle the AP, so no worries. I'll do it myself in future and leave the co-pilot with the communications.

John

John,
If you haven't done more than one other flight since this happened please send me all the PF3/Log files because the CP should NOT get anything wrong and this is the first time I have heard of such a situation

Sorry Dave

I have been flying since and was sort of half joking when I posted this.

Is this 'old debug' file any good to you?

John

Well I can't see anything amiss there with your VCP and headings. Following each heading instruction your aircraft turned to that heading, whether by you flying it or via the AP, whichever, it looked spot on to me. As far as I can tell you were never instruction to turn to 240 nor did you fly in that direction.

Perhaps this is the wrong log?

If you ever experience such things again please report it and include the log with as much detail as possible as to what occurred and we can take another look

Yes, will do Dave. I agree, I don't think you were looking at the right flight.

Thanks for looking anyway. When I'm feeling lazy, I might give her another try.

John