Page 22 - Jan21T&T

Garmin box also suggest the same. My confidence was gradually increasing. For this airplane to shoot the ap- proach on autopilot you must switch the autopilot from NAV to APCH, something I often find instrument students fail to do. Keeping in mind that I would not want to make such a
mistake, I make sure to hit the APCH
button, then look up to see if that indi- cation showed up on the annunciator panel, which it did. From that point the approach was easy until I started get- ting close to the glide slope intercept altitude, only to notice there were no yellow glide slope needles showing up on the visual display. I tapped on the instrument a couple of times thinking
it may have gotten stuck from lack of use, but that didn’t fix it.
In the meantime, the annunciator panel GS (glide slope) light came on, and the autopilot starting trimming nose down to reach a 400 feet per minute or so descent, which with the gear still up caused quite an accelera- tion. Yikes, regardless of the lack of glide slope needles being AWOL, the airplane itself seemed to know what it was doing, and I was getting behind it. Dropping the gear and reducing the power slightly caught me up with the airplane, at which time I reached for the landing checklist to make sure I had not missed anything.
Sure enough, somehow during the glide slope needle problem, I had for- gotten to turn on the pulse light switch that flashes the landing lights on and off in a very noticeable back and forth fashion. I got that oversight fixed then it also occurred to me that if I was going to do this completely right, I needed the radar altimeter alarm set
20 • TWIN & TURBINE / January 2021
Covington