Flight Simulators

As we noted last week (Are there limits to simulator training?), Paul Bertorelli had written an interesting post about the limits of simulator training and in a follow-up post, he noted that he had since received a trickle of (interesting) email about his original post. He noted that one email was from:

….a long-time contributor railing about the inadequacies of modern training and, especially the alarming attitude of some pilots who rely entirely on cutting-edge systems, never giving a second thought to the underlying skills required to survive if those systems fail. He was talking about over reliance on glass and GPS, but it could be any cutting-edge system in the modern airplane

Paul then wrote that we have been having such conversations or debates for about 200 years now. In other words, the debate over simulator training and its limits is just another chapter in the classic confrontation between the traditionalists and the modernists.

However, Paul then asked how you can tell if:

…your insistence that the old way of doing things is a vital primary skill or if you’re just clinging to some ancient procedure in defiance of progress that has rendered it obsolete. In other words, you’ve crossed the line into old fartism.

He then gave two examples of what he viewed as “old fartism” in aviation. First, he noted that not too long after GPS approaches became common, he stopped bothering with NBD approaches on instrument proficiency checks. The reason? GPS approaches are much more accurate and safer plus it required more time to teach. Hence, he dropped NDB approaches – unless a pilot insisted on learning them and had the time.

Paul also added:

Then there’s the dead reckoning fantasy. We still spend time teaching primary students to plot a course and build a nav log, something that few will ever use. Maybe none will ever use. It’s a warm and familiar process that we imagine to be a fundamental airman skill — but we don’t use it, so why teach it?

At the end of his post, Paul pointed out that an astonishing 58% Skylane accidents relate to runway loss of control – mainly on landings. His point? Learning “silly stuff” like dead reckoning does build some aviation skills, but it gets in the way of spending time on learning the stuff that really matters – like basic aircraft control, basic instrument work and of course landings. Important points worth thinking about.

James Olson has recently posted an interesting question on the Ask a Flight Instructor forum that is worth noting. He asked:

Are flight simulators of any help while learning to fly? I suspect that real live experience is the best, any input would be greatly appreciated.

Flight Instructor Paul commented that if you asked 10 different flight instructors, you would probably get 10 different answers. However, he noted that he used flight simulators during his instrument training and it helped him immensely as he found them to be a very valuable training aid. Then he added that as a flight instructor, he has found that flight simulators are not as helpful during primary training since student pilots who have used flight simulators heavily will tend to need more encouragement “to keep their eyeballs outside the cockpit where they should be during private pilot training.”

Meanwhile, pilot Matthew Hammer noted that while they are excellent for training procedures, flight simulators aren’t so great for teaching would-be pilots how to actually fly simply because you “don’t have the same visual references, you don’t experience any G-loads, and the control pressures are virtually never realistic.”

Hence, we want to ask you our readers what you think: Did you use a flight simulator when you learned how to fly? If so, do you believe that flight simulators are actually useful when learning how to fly? Moreover, when and how should they be used? We would also like to hear the opinion of pilots who learned to fly before there were flight simulators.