Regarding teaching autopilot usage: I happen to be the person responsable for the simulator (FNPT II) of our flying school and next week our authority is sending someone for the annual check. So I am presently tidying up the machine a little and repairing some minor faults (I am not qualified and/or equipped to deal with major ones…). One recent criticism was that the lighting of the autopilot panel was not as good as before, actually of the 8 bulbs that illuminate the mode selector buttons 6 had failed. So I disassembled the thing (it is a real autopilot control panel of a well known manufacturer connected to a custom computer interface of the simulator manufacturer) and this is what it lookes like on the inside:
The buttons are constantly lit by minuscule 12V bulbs most of which have burned out during the approx. 4000 hours the machine has been operating. The top row of bulbs are the ones that show the selected operating mode. They all look like new, which means the autopilot has not been used a lot during those 4000 hours 
Instead of locating spare bulbs, I replaced them with LEDs. The mounting holes could not be used (they are 12V and there is no space for the resistors required by the LEDs), some ugly tinkering was required to fix the LEDs. But as this is non-flying hardware, I don’t care too much. Nobody is ever going to see this… What you can also see in the picture is that most mode selector buttons are partially melted by the heat generated from the lighting bulbs! So if you have this kind of autopilot (I won’t say names on a public forum), look out – there is a major design flaw.
