CNN Anderson Cooper 360 December 30, 2014 04:31:00
On halloween, i think it was 1994. they were in a holding pattern on the way in to o'hare. ice slowly builds up. and the autopilot just clicks off with no warning when the ice ridges get too big, and the pilots are startled by the loss of the autopilot and they don't recover. there are other cases in which it's postulated that heavy use of the autopilot makes some of your basic flying skills disappear. they wither away. on the other hand the only way you can have a multihour multicontinent flight is with the autopilot. you can't stand there with the yoke or sit there with the yoke and the rudd...