To add to Llamas’s post. As he mentioned, sim time is expensive (thousands of dollars per hour), so it is a challenge to use it effectively. There are sequences that must be done and they all take time. Then there are additional sequences that the airline feel are topical and should also be done. There is rarely any time left for unusual failures.
To give an idea, you would generally be required to do an engine failure during take off, deal with the problem using correct procedures, return for an engine out approach, do a missed approach, return for another engine out approach (possibly with no autopilot), and a landing. This all takes at least an hour, more like an hour and a half, and both pilots have to do it. So there’s three hours from your four hour sim session gone. Where I work we have two days, two sessions, eight hours total. The rest of the time is easily filled by “normal” non-normals. A simulated hydraulic failure flown to a successful landing can take a couple of hours. Some checklists are involved and take significant time to complete. It is best to make a scenario as much like a normal flight as possible which means pre take off, climb, cruise, descent, landing etc etc.
Another issue with practicing weird failures is that the simulator may not correctly simulate it and may give a false idea of what would happen. Training is only valuable if it is accurate and realistic. You can also have problems where incorrect procedures can still result in a successful outcome which is not really what you want to get out of training.
Another is SAS flight 751. Engines ingested ice and surged, pilots throttled down the engines which should have mitigated the the problem and at least allowed a safe landing - but the Automatic Thrust Restoration system (which the pilots didn’t know about) immediately increased thrust.
Detailed article about that incident here. (That’s part 2, link to part 1 is at the beginning.)
Of course, but the choices are to minimise the sim time and cover the required exercises or add more sim time to cover other training exercises that aren’t required. The cost of operating the real aeroplane is irrelevant in that context.
The electricity is nothing. For a full-motion simulator (i.e. one on a boom/arm or Stewart platform), I’d SWAG it uses maybe a few kilowatts, so you can power an hour of sim time for maybe fifty cents.
However, you’ll need to amortize the cost of the hardware (not cheap, since manufacturers don’t sell tens of thousands of such simulators every year), the cost of the building it’s contained in (real estate/construction/operation/maintenance), the cost of the staff to operate it (including all of their fringe benefits), and the cost of the staff to maintain it (likewise). Richard’s point is well-taken: if a simulator is already 100% utilized for standard pilot training exercises, the cost of a second simulator to cover freak situations that have very slim odds of ever being seen in real life is probably difficult to justify.
I googled A350 cost per hour, and one estimate suggests $19,500 per hour (assuming an 8-hour flight). A similar search for 737 costs suggests about $7,000 per hour. I suppose sim time could be $3,000 per hour and still be seen as a bargain, especially for training exercises that might entail significant crash risk.
I imagine the cost of a simulator includes the cost of a qualified instructor to oversee the training.
Anyway, no matter how expensive it is, it’s way cheaper than disabling a real plane and occasionally losing one because the trainee did something wrong.
