I am not a pilot, although I have spent a few hours in a small airplane’s cockpit as a flight student.
I understand, that due to the extreme cost of using a real airplane for pilot training, simulators are heavily used for that purpose. Pilots need to use them again in their careers to keep up with technology.
A simulator is supposed to reproduce the actual flight experience as closely as possible, and many parameters can be entered, like weather, instrument failure, and hardware faults.
How do we know the simulator is 100% accurate compared to the real thing? Someone had to program it – what if they made a mistake? Surely not ALL unforeseen circumstances can be covered. Think of how many times, IRL, that an unusual condition led to disaster, like the recent helicopter crash in DC. TCAS didn’t operate below a certain height (to avoid false positives from ground clutter), yet, apparently, the traffic system didn’t take this into account.
So if real systems miss some scenarios, what are the chances of a simulator doing the same thing (and no one catching it)?
Paging @LSLGuy, who I believe was formerly a pilot?
FWIW though, sims don’t have to be 100% accurate to still have value, and they don’t replace actual flight hours. They’re just additional training. They also let you drill scenarios that would be either extremely rare and/or deadly in real life. I’m glad pilots have SOME experience with those kinds of scenarios, even if virtual.
Link Trainers and similar devices have been around since the 1920s. They were originally designed and built by aviators, and they were used in training pilots by people who knew what to expect. If nothing else, almost a hundred years of use by people who know the difference between a simulator and The Real Thing ought to count for something.
That’s not really the point of a simulator as I understand it. Even if it’s only 90% accurate, it’s a lot safer and cheaper to train pilots 90% of the way on a simulator before (or in addition to) climbing into an actual cockpit.
A simulator isn’t one single monolithic device. In particular there is a human driving the sim that is responsible for creating the various problems and scenarios. The job of the simulator hardware is to reproduce as faithfully as possible what the pilots would experience in real time. It doesn’t simulate the entire world.
When it comes to emergency situations, the best you can hope for is well trained responses. Simulators are your best answer. For the most obvious ones, like engine failures/fires, other systems failures, training with clear response checklists is the best chance of a good day. Unobvious emergencies, and you hope for experience, clear headed thinking and a situation where there is actually a way out. Simulation time will help. But you cant train for every possible bad day.
As to the DC helicopter disaster. There is nothing a simulation could have helped with. The helicopter was 100% in the wrong, the pilots of the CRJ did exactly what they should have done at every moment of the flight. The TCAS system maybe might have saved them, if TCAS systems were configured differently, but the existing configuration is a how the devices are required to operate, it isn’t something pilots have control over. Choosing to have TCAS make flight height change advisories when the plane is already very close to the ground could easily result in more fatal accidents than not doing so. That question might get revisited in light of this accident, but I would not be jumping to conclusions about the right answer. Blaming TCAS for the collision is the excuse of scoundrels.
I like to point to Nancy Leveson’s book Engineering a Safer World. She makes a point often missed. There is the how an accident happened (one so often hears people talk about Swiss Cheese), but this misses the point. The why of how it happened is what needs addressing. Concentrating on the how, ends up doing things like changing the TCAS systems, and changing the flight rules around the airport. The why, seeks to address the actual problems: culture of normalising failure, bowing to pressure from politicians and the military, and so on. Right now the NTSB is doing a fabulous job, and they clearly understand this.
Causes are never simple. There’s always multiple levels of decisions and happenstances that led to failure. Stopping analysis at the final cause is in fact a causes of future failures.
When I was a new airline pilot I was struck by how much easier the real plane was to land. But that’s by design. The sim is made, to some extent, to be demanding. But there are strict standards on this.
I now teach at a sim facility. Each simulator is treated like an aircraft, with a crew chief and everything. The certification standards are a big deal and it’s a continuous task.
I’m aware of at least one situation where our simulator predicted an actual flight behavior before it was ever seen in real life. That’s because of how carefully the system is replicated and programmed. Pretty amazing.
It’s well known driving a car is not particularly safe, either, but we don’t train for all situations there, either. You are quite likely to experience an unexpected situation at some point the longer you do drive. You hope that your trained responses and experienced judgment will see you through. I’m not even sure it’s possible to plan for all possible contingencies - and new ones are popping up all the time and some are extreme edge cases.
That said, it seems to me that the most interesting and distinctively useful application of simulation is situational training for exceptional conditions. Emergencies, system failures, extreme meteorological conditions, the like. Stuff where you can’t provoke the situation IRL, or where it would be dangerous to do so.
And I also like incident investigations where the conditions of the incident are simulated and the investigator can ask “what if?” questions and play out the scenario. Or just test to see if a particular factual outcome was especially likely or unlikely when simulating the events with several pilots.
I have a Private Pilots License with 85 hours (mostly Archers, Cessnas and Cherokees) though I haven’t flown in a decade. I flew a 747 Flight Sim at a amusement park a few years ago. Tried to land that pig 3 times at Kyoto International and killed everyone on board 3 times. All the controls felt delayed as they would on such a large craft.
For most situations we train, the sim is pretty close to real life. If it’s off, it’s meant to be off in a way that’s more challenging than the real airplane.
Not sure of how sophisticated the programming is these days, but I recall years ago reading that aerodynamic stalls cannot be accurately replicated through dynamic programming because of the inherently chaotic nature of the airflow in that condition. So flight sims were programmed to go into a “stall mode” under certain conditions that mimic aerodynamic stall behavior. Most people would never be able to tell the difference. Not sure if computing power has caught up with that yet.
My personal experience has always been (through five jet type ratings) that the sim is much harder to fly than the real thing. Not just because we are doing mostly emergency and abnormal scenarios, but because it’s purposely made hard challenging to fly.
Is it true that most flight sim time is spent managing the various systems, and not so much on stick-and-rudder training? By which I mean extensive sessions testing the limits, inducing stalls and spins, and learning how to recover from them.
That’s what apparently doomed the Air France flight, as the first officer had very little experience with such even if he did with systems management, compounded by the intermittent stall warning feature.
But the focus is on emergency and abnormal situations. When I came out of airline training and began flying the line I had to learn how to fly “normal” again. After the simulator I was fully prepared to fly the plane down to landing in crap weather with one of the engines on fire. But I didn’t know how to do some simple, typical things. That’s what initial operating experience (IOE) with a training captain is for.
Do they take into account the panic of reality? The real possibility that you, your teammates and your passengers could die, that people may be choking to death on toxic smoke, those very real thoughts that rush through your mind in the few seconds you have left to either find a solution or hit the intercom to prep others? I spent many hours in military school in simulators and the one thing that was never felt was panic and/or fear.
How would you suggest they do that? I’m amused to imagine pilots in a situation like the movie “Cats Eye”. They kidnap a family member and say, “Fly this ILS correctly, or the wife dies!”
Seriously though, by the time you find yourself in a full-motion flight simulator nobody needs to tell you it’s serious and that lives are at stake. You’ve already logged hundreds of hours of actual flight time in small planes. And the scenarios feel very, very real. You can forget you’re in a box on moveable hydraulic jacks.
And if it isn’t already real enough, some of the newer simulators have smoke generators (supposedly non-toxic) to simulate fire and smoke emergencies. It sure as hell feels real. *
I was getting my ATP at the same time I was qualifying to be an airline pilot, and my ongoing livelihood depended on it. So believe me, I understood the stakes. If anything, I took it too seriously and needed to calm down a bit. I never really thought about the number of people on the plane when I was flying for real. A hundred or none - didn’t matter. As the saying goes, “The pilot arrives at the site of the crash first.” So if I land safely, good chance everyone else does too.
Re, the smoke generator. A few months ago I was in the sim participating in an instructor checkride. We were given an abnormal scenario which required the crew oxygen masks, which we completed successfully. We then had to decide, do a fast emergency landing or do a normal approach?
I tried to slow things down and said to my right-seater, “We’re good now. Let’s do the full ILS. The airplane is not on fire.”
Of course, at that moment the instructor triggered the smoke. At which point I said, “Okay, NOW it’s on fire! Put it on the ground!”
