I would skip the fancy nav steering and coupling, you can
always use the heading bug to track the needle and get the
pitch trim ASAP. But, it isn't my airplane. A wing leveler
like Mooney installed is a big aid, but real altitude hold
and trim is just as important.

If you want to get spoiled, fly a $500,000 Sperry autopilot
in a King Air. I've flown a few hundred different Bonanzas,
from late 1940 models to the B36TC, if they had an
autopilot, [all the ones built after about 1965 that I flew
did] they had electric trim.

We did a Category II certification on the Beechjet and
encountered a problem caused by a poorly written flight test
schedule. The DER that was hired wrote a schedule that
called for the coupled approaches to be flown at a
stabilized speed of 1.3 Vso from the OM to landing or missed
approach. We could hand fly within the tolerances, but the
autopilot could not. We had to do extreme fore and aft CG
and the autopilot would get wild on the ILS. Came to find
out several things... FAR 25 requires that the airplane trim
function to 1.4 Vso, so 1.3 Vso might not be a trimable
speed, depending on CG. Also the autopilot was certified at
1.3 Vso +10, as far as those who did the original
certification could remember.
So we re-wrote the flight test schedule and the autopilot
flew well within the 95% 1 dot on all the approaches because
it was in trim at 1.3 Vso+10.


--
James H. Macklin
ATP,CFI,A&P

--
The people think the Constitution protects their rights;
But government sees it as an obstacle to be overcome.
some support
http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/secondamendment2.htm
See http://www.fija.org/ more about your rights and duties.


"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
| In article PG5ag.20818$ZW3.19044@dukeread04,
| Jim Macklin wrote:
| I've never seen a Bonanza without electric trim and an
| autopilot installed.
|
| Apparently not :-)
|
| What you have seems to be just a wing leveler with
heading and
| [maybe] tracking.
|
| Nope. It does heading, tracks nav, altitude hold, course
intercepts,
| and coupled ILS approaches. Once we get the kinks worked
out of the
| new add-on box, it'll be doing GPS roll steering too.
We've got one
| driven from a CDI, another with an HSI. It just doesn't
have electric
| trim. It's an option, and we don't have that option.
Wish we did,
| but we don't.