Let’s lay down a simple fact:
AUTOPILOT NEVER FLIES THE PLANE.
Well, sort of.
Even in the most advanced aircraft known to mankind, the autopilot is rendered useless without at least one pilot constantly watching it. Here’s why:
Those four displays are telling you what the autopilot is doing. In this example, it’s flying South-East at 10,000 feet at 483 km p/h.
See those four black knobs under the displays? They’re the inputs.
They let the pilot say “hey computer, take us to FL100 [10,000 feet]!” instead of the computer just freestyling the whole time, which can be dangerous on a 300 seat aircraft.
Also if you were to maintain a heading of say, 185 degrees from Brisbane to Sydney, you would need to tell the computer that. But what if you hit a wind gust? What if you have to go around an airspace? What if you have to turn back to Brisbane?
So the pilots are constantly adjusting these settings to make sure they don’t break any laws/crash the plane.
They can also talk, read books, and basically do whatever they want.
To prevent arguments/distractions however, the FAA says that all non-professional conversation must be above 10,000 feet.
Author – Lachie Smith
