Can CPG fly?

[dresoccer4]

Can you have the CPG fly straight and level while you're in the pilot seat? He has the necessary controls, so I assume he's qualified. This would be very handy in case you need to be looking around the cockpit at switches or dealing with spilt coffee. 

[AeriaGloria]

If you have a human front seater, but Petro can’t

I would recommend getting good with the autopilot. It’s not quick and easy, no press a button then go get coffee. But once you have it stable it will stay there until it’s out of fuel. 

For barometric altitude hold, you have to engage it at essentially 0 m/s descent for it to work right. Might need to use hat trim to make sure it stays at 0. Being well trimmed is key here. It also won’t work well at high speeds, at high speed the elevator that moves with collective causes too much of a pitch movement for the altitude autopilot to compensate.

So when your speed is stable it can help to use speed hold together with it, the altitude hold in the Mi-8 is speed hold and altitude hold combined anyways. If pitch AP is active, speed hold will pitch you down if you slow down and pitch you up if you go too fast. 
 

In addition either yaw or route modes can give additional stability, so an out of trim roll state won’t develop. Route mode requires doppler, thus you have to be slow enough that your nose is above a 7 degree dive for it to work. 
 

I’ve been able to have people ring my door bell, put her in autopilot, have a nice chat and come back with everything fine. But it’s hard to get the hang off, and the barometric altitude hold still gives me headaches sometimes 

[aaronwhite]

On 3/18/2022 at 7:12 PM, AeriaGloria said:

If you have a human front seater, but Petro can’t

I would recommend getting good with the autopilot. It’s not quick and easy, no press a button then go get coffee. But once you have it stable it will stay there until it’s out of fuel. 

For barometric altitude hold, you have to engage it at essentially 0 m/s descent for it to work right. Might need to use hat trim to make sure it stays at 0. Being well trimmed is key here. It also won’t work well at high speeds, at high speed the elevator that moves with collective causes too much of a pitch movement for the altitude autopilot to compensate.

So when your speed is stable it can help to use speed hold together with it, the altitude hold in the Mi-8 is speed hold and altitude hold combined anyways. If pitch AP is active, speed hold will pitch you down if you slow down and pitch you up if you go too fast. 
 

In addition either yaw or route modes can give additional stability, so an out of trim roll state won’t develop. Route mode requires doppler, thus you have to be slow enough that your nose is above a 7 degree dive for it to work. 
 

I’ve been able to have people ring my door bell, put her in autopilot, have a nice chat and come back with everything fine. But it’s hard to get the hang off, and the barometric altitude hold still gives me headaches sometimes 

Agree with AeriaGloria. The good news is, once you get the autopilot on and then get it trimmed (I've really enjoyed having a trim hat in addition to the trim button itself) you can fine tune it to where your vertical velocity indicator is sitting at 0, showing that you're not gaining or losing altitude and you can be relatively hands off while you go heads down in the cockpit to find a switch or configure something.