Paul Bertorelli has a new post up about the limits of simulation training, specifically as it relates to crosswind handling characteristics. The comment thread following is unusually good. I’ve never flown a motion-base simulator before, nor do I have any experience behind or in front of turbine engines or transport-category aircraft where simulator-based training formed a major component of the education, so this is a topic to which I can add very little. I would, however, point out one of my very favorite items from an issue of the Aviation Safety Letter last year: a letter talking about the limits of the simulator as a method for dealing with in-flight fires.

“Smoke in the cockpit after departure hopefully initiates a checklist routine, but only at the end of the procedure does the option of returning to the airport come into play, if at all. “Okay, that’s done, let’s carry on,” is the lesson actually learned in the training and carried forward into the flight test. Survival is only a secondary consideration,” as the letter-writer puts it. He goes on to point at SWR111 as an example of what happens when pilots fail to recognize that they’re on fire and they need to be on the ground now — a habit that seems like it would only be developed through the use of simulations. In fairness, I’m not sure how to educate pilots in this, short of lighting the plane on fire and saying, “Good luck!” So maybe there’s no other way to get around that problem.

As I said, I obviously know nothing about transport simulator training curriculum, so I can’t really speak to how it works in the real world. But when you set up a fire, and then run the fire checklist — do you then turn around and fly the plane to the ground? Do you simulate the evacuation? (CKT28M, anyone?) Could you come up with a way to realistically simulate the incapacitating effects of cockpit smoke? (Fail the flight instruments and then blow the external displays?) If we don’t do this, why don’t we do this? As we train, so shall we fight — or something like that, anyway.