Running on autopilot, no look-out?

Tricolor was struck midships by a ship (MV Kariba)making a sudden turn. Blame for the collision was placed on Kariba. That collision sank Tricolor.
The other two collisions occurred after Tricolor sank and was sitting on the bottom in shallow water.

Long long ago when took my car drivers test in the UK.....the hand book had, at the bottom of each page an drawing of an ambulance with a balloon saying....'I was in the right'.

This maxim applies to boats as well as cars.....

Personally, i always have someone at the helm when under autopilot. Scares me stiff when I read of the incidents listed in this thread.

Discretion is definitely better than valour.

We had an old and ugly twin piston engine liaison STOL aircraft (the Dornier Do 28 D2) in the German Air Force and Navy. Very noisy, in and outside and it could do only about 120 Kts. And thank God, it was IFR capable bud it had no autopilot. Each fighter wing had about 5 of them and they were flown by us young jet pilots as secondary duty for hauling spare parts, shuttle generals and sometimes just to get away from deskjobs (We called it proficiency training).

But longer distance flights were so boring, that everybody had problems not falling asleep, especially when flying under instruments. We had a running gag going with this A/C saying, if this machine (we called it the farmers eagle, because it could T/O and land on any 300 ft dirt strip) would have an autopilot, all Dorniers from southern Germany would have fallen finally into the North Sea with both pilot sleeping until flameout and all Dorniers from northern Germany would have crashed into the Alps with both pilots also sleeping upon impact.



I always said, I had to fly this optical and acustical insult only for punishment. Will say, sometimes it is even better not to have an autopilot .