There’s no SOP for engaging the autopilot, but this is usually done in the initial climb (500ft – 5000ft).

There is an SOP, and every airline will have one regarding the use of the autopilot after take off.
Ours is to engage the autopilot when we reach acceleration altitude (1,000ft aal), basically no autopilot on take off below 1000ft aal. However, tied in with this is the clause that allows us to hand fly the aircraft, if the weather is good we can hand fly it, as long as we’re not departing from a major Intl Airport like CDG we can hand fly it too. The only bad thing about hand flying it is that we are still following the flight director, and it get’s rather boring. Monkee see – Monkee do.

The autopilot is usually disconnected when landing clearance is received – as it’s safer to let the A/P do a G/A then the pilot themselves. (If you listen to a scanner at LHR, you can here all the airbus A/P’s been disconnected when the aircraft is cleared to land.

Again company SOPs will dictate this, and some will be more stringent than others, again we can hand fly the approach if we like, but only under certain conditions, i.e. no parallel approaches etc. We can conduct visual approaches too which are totally hand flown.
What we do have to do is disconnect the autopilot at 200ft ARTE on a CAT I, and 80ft ARTE on a CAT II.

You would only let the autopilot do the G/A if the G/A is in the FMS, this is not always the case, the initial part of the G/A is hand flown to at least Acceleration Altitude. Then autopilot engaged, all you are doing here is letting the AP fly the flight director, which will either take it’s information from the FMS or pilot input.

Dean

Love it, then my car broke down to boot, just spent the last 3hrs in a recovery vehicle on the M5 :rolleyes:

Happened to me in EXT at night last winter, fog was forming in the valleys and as we got to 50ft we went through a thin layer of fog, luckily regaining visual contact before touchdown.
Was rather disconcerting I tell you, we were about to go around when we became visual again.

See them all the time in GCI & JER, Blue Island have a few. Do Eastern still fly the 31?

Not sure Andy to be honest, they are still in JAR land and CAP371 is a binding document of the ANO (formed by ICAO), I’d imagine they must have something extremely similar.

Happy to be proved wrong of course if anyone knows exactly, but I have a friend who was with Ryanair and he talked about “Maxing out of hours at 900” etc.

Tinkers, hmm, that’s a new definition on me 😉

rob39

There is no difference between Ryanair, Thomsonfly, Flybe, British Airways etc, all of us are limited by CAP371 which is a legal and binding document of the ANO (Air Navigation Order).

FTL (Flight Time Limitations) are basically no more than:-

100hrs in 28 days
900hrs in 1 year

Both of these limits are “rolling”.

Duty Periods shall not exceed

55hrs in 7 days
95hrs in 14 days
190hrs in 28 days.

Again these are rolling limits. I am sure there’s an annual limit of something like 1950hrs but I can’t locate it.

Unless of course they and their company have alternative ‘industrial’ agreements, however these would always be for lesser rather than greater amounts of flying.

1L.

This can be the case but as you say it cannot be more than those FTL & Duty times as laid down by CAP371, this document is limiting in all circumstances.

Of course there is discretion, pilots & cabin crew can go into discretion which will be no more than 2hrs after the official deadline of your duty period for that day, you cannot knowingly go into discretion, and it is the commanders decision as to whether he thinks his crew can operate safely & efficiently.
If we do go into discretion then there’s alot of paperwork involved and we have to inform the CAA with a valid reason.
Duty periods are laid down in CAP371 for daily limits, taking into account your report time & how many sectors you fly, the earlier you check in and the more sectors you fly the more the Duty Period is limiting.

Clear as mud? though so 😉

Shocking 😉

As long as the plane is on the ground then normally it is ok, we get flight deck visit requests on a weekly basis and we’re always very happy to accommodate where necessary, the best one was a group of French hotties coming over for their hen night, suffice to say they wanted to have their photos taken sat on the f/o’s lap 😀