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« Last post by schrambow on March 24, 2026, 09:54:03 am »
Yes, very quiet in here the last half a year for sure.
We have had some issues with our 3100 Autopilot we are trying to troubleshoot.
This might be the wrong area to post, but what the heck.
We will get about 40 minutes of working autopilot in the beginning of the flight, and it will just disconnect and say Auto Failure. It then clears and we can use the flight director portion and manual fly the bird. Whenever i try and hit the autopilot button, it tries to engine the servos but then without 1 second it disconnects and gives the same message.
I have taken it to the shop and of course the autopilot works perfectly fine both down and back from the shop (1 hour flight each way) We have changed out the AHRS box and it acts the same way, so it can't be that. I need it to fail down at the shop in order for them to properly troubleshoot, maybe i can set it up on an APU for an hour or two with the autopilot engaged and hopefully it will fail and they can then figure out what is causing this failure.
It's been working decent for about 2 years since we put it in though, and just started to act up in the last month or so. Got about 15 hours in the last month hand flying it, so getting used of the old days of hand flying commanders when those Bendix M4B autopilots would fail all the time - actually very easy to hand fly commanders and is an non issue for me, and I do find it less boring, but it's harder to eat a sandwich when hand flying.
Just thought i would share with the group as it is pretty slow on here lately, and to see if anyone else knows about the 3100 as they are in many commanders now.
thanks
corey