Emergency Decent

[Spinplate]

I think only way to do it is with autopilot!

Done that and it worked well! We had smoke in the cockpit, so we were unable to see aircrafts attitude , speed, etc.... We got masks on, pulled paxs masks out. We cranked altitude alerter to zero, then went up 10 clicks, worked for that location up to 10000ft. With autopilot on,command nose down, in our ac hold wheel 10 seconds and should give 10degrees nose down I also pressed heading putton and turned little bit to the left away from airway. We pulled power idle, speedbrakes out, notified controller, finished rest of the memory items, at that point we started to see something, we were through 17000ft. And biggest hurry was behind us.

If we would have disconnect autopilot I dont know what would have happend. Maybe unusual attitude, structural damage, stall, CFIT... that is scary tought.

So I stick with autopilot!

In that situation yes of course, you would NEED the A/P, it is completely situational as when you should or shouldnt use the A/P in an emergency descent.

 

[pilot1704]

You got that right it depens from situation!

Personally I think that for years all the schools and training I attend have told us to disconnect A/P and dive!

Only about 2 years ago I was tought in training to use A/P.

It still seems that the habit is to disconnect and get distracted with all the stress and workload!

My best experience is that once we had this situation and we dropped masks for pax and minute later Pax came to cockpit and was asking me whats going on! Needless to say what was my answer!

crap down and shut up and mask on!


Safe flying!