Over Macho Grande?
I’ll never be over Macho Grande.
I don’t see any problems landing a real 767 on a real aircraft carrier … it’s the roll-out that gets tricky … but don’t the seats on that plane float?
Civilian sims are only really good for procedural training. The lack of g-forces and pressure changes means that you never really feel like you’re flying. For instrument training they are quite good because anything you feel when on instruments should be disregarded anyway. They give some movements to try and fool your senses that you are flying when you are really bolted to the ground, but it is crude and while it adds a little to the immersion, it doesn’t really fool you.
My current type is old and the sims are old. They don’t accurately replicate the control forces of the real aircraft. They do have control forces but they are not the same. It is not far off but it is off by enough that you kind of have to treat it like a different aeroplane. The tiller steering on the ground all works but again it feels a bit different. That said, there are a lot of differences between the real aircraft in our fleet so the differences the sim has aren’t completely unrealistic.
A lot of people who are ok at flying the real thing aren’t that good at handling the sim. It is often referred to as a fault amplifier. If you have any deficiencies in your flying it will become immediately apparent in the sim. A tendency to over control may be masked by the real aircraft but the sim can become nearly un-flyable for the same pilot. I’ve been in the sim with a guy who failed a check, he just could not fly it. Once the autopilot came out, he over controlled and overcorrected until we were gyrating about the sky. I’ve since flown with him in real life and, while not the sharpest pilot out there, he’s fine, he just can’t get a handle on the sim (though obviously he gets his shit together enough to pass his checks most of the time or he wouldn’t still be here.)
What I would say is that pilots who are good in the real aircraft aren’t guaranteed to be any good in the sim, but pilots who are good in the sim invariably are good in the real aircraft. The techniques required to fly the sim well do translate to flying the real aircraft well. The biggest one being to keep it trimmed. Amazing how many experienced pilots don’t trim adequately.
Where sims really fail is when they have a limitation that requires a sequence to be flown differently in the sim to how you would in real life. For example our sim has slightly less than 180º of vision. This means you can’t see when you are abeam the runway threshold on downwind and from that point on in the circuit you can’t see the runway at all. This means that bad weather circuits must be flown using timing and procedure rather than visually. The rules actually require that for a circling approach you keep the runway environment in sight at all times, that’s not possible in the sim and I think it trains us to continue with a circling approach because we are so used to doing it by dead reckoning when in reality if we lost all reference to the airport we should be going around.
When you crash the sim, as long as you stayed in the normal speed range up to the point of impact then it is all fairly realistic up until you hit the ground. Then the controls just go slack and the screen turns red.
To sum up, a sim is not there to teach you to fly. It can help you with instrument procedures and they are a great way to practice emergency procedures for scenarios that would be dangerous to try in the real aircraft.
I came back around here to answer Gus’ question from a couple days ago. Been busy.
Nothing really much to add to Richard Pearse’s superb post.
The biggest area of unreality IMO/IME is in control feel. If the airplane feels like a BMW, crisp and direct, the sim feels like a Buick; spongy and mooshy.
The other big difference that really shows up with hand-flying is that the sim instruments & motion react a smidgen of a second slower than the airplane does, then the visual reacts a smidgen of a second slower yet. The newer and more advanced the sim the less pronounced the lag. On the old machines that lag leads to a strong tendency to PIO. Newer sims are better, but still well short of perfect replication of reality.
As **Richard **said, the guys with lightning cross checks who just push & pull until the instruments read right can fly the sim tightly and well. Schlubs like me that do it more by muscle memory and feel are meandering all over the place. The additional lag with the visual on some sims makes visual approaches in poor weather much more fraught than they are in real life. You’re only one false move from an PIO that will end in a go-around.
The motion cues are very good, and very believable … for small brief maneuvers. The sensations when pulling off power or nosing over on an approach are very real. The sensations of engine failure and uncoordinated flight; not so much.
And the lack of ability to replicate Gs even a little bit adds a lot of unreality to stall and unusual attitude training. To the point the industry is arriving at the realization that the last 20 years of this unreality have probably been negative training that has set up some real world accidents.
Thanks guys.
Ignorance fought.
But with me, it still might be a losing battle… Bawahahahaa 
Was going to post this in one of the GQ threads, but I’ll say it here – just want to say to LSLGuy that your expert commentary here as an airline pilot is always informative. I’ve been a fan of airplanes, especially the big airliners, ever since I was a kid, so know that you’ve got an appreciative reader here. Keep 'em coming! 
Always wanted to fly a commercial simulator, never had the chance. Had a fascinating visit to CAE once in Montreal, who makes a lot of them. Besides the sims for commercial jets, at the time they were putting together fighter-jet sims for the Israeli military. IIRC, the entire canopy was a 360-degree display. The cost-is-no-object approach allowed them to cluster computers together in parallel to provide the necessary processing power, but one of the challenges in those days of 10 Mbit/s Ethernet was the bandwidth between the computers and the simulator. They literally had bundles of Ethernet cables running between them.