cforst513 said:
I was watching a video posted in another forum about a 707 and the golden age of flight and i got to thinking: did those old 707s have autopilots? if so, was it just altitude and heading, or did they have autothrottles too?
DC-9s had simple autopilots that remained the same for the 20 some odd years of their production.
It was pretty basic stuff. wing leveler, heading hold, airspeed and vertical speed hold. Altitude hold. VOR/ILS tracking. No altitude capture or LNAV.
There are flight directors, but they are totally non-integrated with the autopilots (separate systems entirely). NWA's DC-9 APs are Cat 2 qualfied, and they do the job well enough..
Most -9s have a very, very basic autothrottle system. When engaged, it simply follows the fast/slow pointer, and it was used only on approach. There is no way to tell it to do anything else.
NWA's autothrottles are all deactivated except on ome of the -50s, and even then, no one uses them.
Nu