I was coming in for an approach to Auckland today, and everything was going smoothly at first. I had been flying in a 12-hour long haul flight from RKSI in a Boeing 777-300ER, expert server, so I was eager to get it finished. But when I tried to adjust my altitude via AP at the request of Auckland approach, I accidentally turned off my Auto-pilot. Immediately my plane began to dive, so I tried to recover. When it did, I panicked and immediately changed position, meaning now my phone was un-calibrated to my new sitting position.
Once I did calibrate it, I managed to start recovering. But the ATC warned me that I wasn’t following instructions. Before this, I had been following instructions to the tee, so it agitated me. By this point, I had dropped from 3000ft to almost 1000ft, and I couldn’t exceed 200kts. Given the fact that it was New Zealand, I was worried about the hills as well.
The 777 being such a heavy plane, it was tough to do quick climbs in a short amount of time. You can see my problem here.
If I had thrown my throttle into 100% while also doing a steep climb, it’d look like I’m doing acrobatics in an expert server, which I did not want. But because in the perspective of the ATC, my weird and sudden drop followed by a slow recovery meant I wasn’t following directions, I was ghosted and reported. A level 2 violation. This was frustrating, considering the time it took and my inability to apologize or signal that it was a blunder.
Is there any way I can overturn this? I know to some this may not seem like a big deal, but I had kept a relatively spotless grade table (apart from accidental speed violations over 250 days ago)
This happened at around 15:41 Z, earlier today.
Thank you for any feedback.