How to be safely stupid

Interesting call today. I talked to S-TEC/Meggit. I am doing my
annual and wanted to cure a longstanding issue with my S-TEC 30
autopilot.

The issue was that when dimming the unit down, when you turn the
potentiometer below a certain value, the light on the S-tec 30
goes to full bright.

The S-tec 30 has a line that connects to the panel light, but it
does not draw power from it, but rather, it uses it as a "sense"
line and dims the light to match what the rest of the panel
does.

Unfortunately, on dark nights this behavior works out so that
just when you most need to turn the panel down to the lowest
settings, the minimum panel light required, so that you can
see mountains in the dark, the light on the S-TEC 30 goes to
full bright. This leads to workarounds such as having to put
tape over the light, completely defeating its purpose.

I'd always figgured this was a problem with the way it was
connected, so I called them about fixing it. Much to my
surprise, they told me it was a "design feature". If the
panel lighting were to "short out" or otherwise turn
completely off, the S-tec unit will still show its light.

Of course, it makes complete sense. The s-tec can't be
that accurate about when it triggers this "fail safe" mode,
so its going to occur whenever the lighting is set
particularly low, which is unusual. Unfortunately, that's
just what you have to do on a moonless night to really get
your full night vision.

Its a good example of "fail safe stupid". Everyone had a
good reason for getting there, but the result is fairly
insipid. I'll probably "solve" it by permanently taping some
dark plastic film over the front of the instrument.

In any case, if the lighting on the panel really were to
fail, how having one bright "autopilot on" light in the
midst of a sea of dark gages would help escapes me right now.

Cheers,

Scott Moore

PS. Hey Garmin! Where's our 430/530 Waas upgrades!

Scott,

Just an off the wall suggestion but have you thought about putting some
"neutral density" material over the display when you need it to be/stay
really low?

If you have a full-service camera store in your area, stop in and tell them
about your S-Tec display. Tell them you need some 2-stop (dark) and/or
4-stop (really dark) neutral density gel (aka...ND) and see if they can help
you out.

A couple of small pieces of the good cloth duct tape (not the silver plastic
stuff), a rectangle of the ND and "Bob's yer uncle."

Like I said, just an off the wall idea.

HTH,

Jay Beckman
PP-ASEL
Chandler, AZ
www.pbase.com/flyingphotog

scott moore writes:

Its a good example of "fail safe stupid". Everyone had a
good reason for getting there, but the result is fairly
insipid. I'll probably "solve" it by permanently taping some
dark plastic film over the front of the instrument.

The behavior makes sense for IFR, but less so for VFR. If you are flying IFR,
you need to be able to see your instruments, and the effect this has on being
able to see outside isn't that important, since you may well be in IMC,
anyway. If you are flying VFR, you need to be able to see outside, but you'd
be less likely to use an autopilot in that case.

If you disengage the autopilot with the lights turned down, do the lights on
the autopilot then go dim?

There are a number of possible design choices here, none of them ideal. I
would not rush to second-guess the designers on the behavior they actually
chose without carefully considering all the possibilities and options they had
to consider themselves.

In any case, if the lighting on the panel really were to
fail, how having one bright "autopilot on" light in the
midst of a sea of dark gages would help escapes me right now.

It could keep you straight and level while you figure out the other problems.
You might even be able to use some of the light from the AP to see the other
gages, if you had a mirror (which you would, since mirrors are useful survival
equipment).

How would a dark autopilot in a sea of dark gages be more useful?

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

scott moore wrote:
Interesting call today. I talked to S-TEC/Meggit. I am doing my
annual and wanted to cure a longstanding issue with my S-TEC 30
autopilot.

Yep, it would be nice if they bothered to document the stupidity.
On the 55X the autopilot disconnect raucous beep about blows my
hearing. Turns out from talking to STEC that it can be adjusted
(you do have to slide the controller slightly out of the tray) and
in addition it can be immediately squelched by double clicking
the red button (which is documented no where in the pilot docs
as near as I can tell).

Mxsmanic wrote:

The behavior makes sense for IFR, but less so for VFR. If you are flying IFR,
you need to be able to see your instruments, and the effect this has on being
able to see outside isn't that important, since you may well be in IMC,
anyway. If you are flying VFR, you need to be able to see outside, but you'd
be less likely to use an autopilot in that case.

What the hell do you know. The above is complete gibberish. Turn on
some lights next to your pc and stop trying to confuse the real pilots.
You haven't a freaking clue what it is to fly either at night or in real
IFR conditions.

Ron Natalie writes:

What the hell do you know. The above is complete gibberish. Turn on
some lights next to your pc and stop trying to confuse the real pilots.
You haven't a freaking clue what it is to fly either at night or in real
IFR conditions.

I see a long and emotional personal attack, but I don't see a rebuttal.

If you have a different opinion of your own, why not just express it, and skip
the diatribe?

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Dang Ron,
why don't you kill file MX? I didn't even realize he had responded to this thread with his obvious pearls of wisdom until you replied to him. I got so sick of seeing his ramblings that I switched back to O/E just so I could kill the sucker.

--
Jim Carter
Rogers, Arkansas
"Ron Natalie" wrote in message ...
Mxsmanic wrote:

The behavior makes sense for IFR, but less so for VFR. If you are flying IFR,
you need to be able to see your instruments, and the effect this has on being
able to see outside isn't that important, since you may well be in IMC,
anyway. If you are flying VFR, you need to be able to see outside, but you'd
be less likely to use an autopilot in that case.

What the hell do you know. The above is complete gibberish. Turn on
some lights next to your pc and stop trying to confuse the real pilots.
You haven't a freaking clue what it is to fly either at night or in real
IFR conditions.

"Ron Natalie" wrote in message
...
Mxsmanic wrote:
You haven't a freaking clue what it is to fly either at night or in real
IFR conditions.

Or ANY conditions....at all!!

While I took the pledge, I feel compelled to respond, in hopes of ending
further MX related posts. He is an unfortunate individual who suffers from a
personality disorder, and his posts should probably be ignored or at least
taken with a very large grain of salt, since he is not a pilot, has never
flown, and his opinions are based on his deluded perception of flying.

Kinda makes Robert L. Bass look like a 20,000 hour ATP.



"Viperdoc" wrote in message
t...
While I took the pledge, I feel compelled to respond, in hopes of ending
further MX related posts. He is an unfortunate individual who suffers from
a personality disorder, and his posts should probably be ignored or at
least taken with a very large grain of salt, since he is not a pilot, has
never flown, and his opinions are based on his deluded perception of
flying.