Comparing Simulator vs. In-aircraft Training

Pie vs. cake. Tastes great vs. less filling. Nature vs. nurture. These are all great debates that can divide a room. But pilots and aircraft owners often engage in another debate that can have serious consequences: simulator vs. in-aircraft training.

On one side, there’s no question that you can do things in a simulator that you can’t—or shouldn’t—do in an aircraft. On the other side, there’s no substitute for the feel of an actual aircraft and accompanying g-forces during certain maneuvers or the “pucker” factor of seeing terra firma rising to smite you to drive home certain procedures.

Is there a “correct” answer to the simulator vs. in-aircraft debate? According to Richard Meikle, Executive Vice President of Operations and Safety for FlightSafety International, the safest pilots tend to train both ways, but there is a caveat.

Prepared Pilots Make Safer Pilots

“An operator focused on safety is going to send its pilots to simulator training because you can do things in the sim that you cannot do in the airplane safely or without risking damage to the aircraft,” said Meikle. “No one is going to shut off the fuel during takeoff to introduce an engine failure in the aircraft, but you can do that all day long in the simulator.”

Other examples of emergency situations that can be practiced in the simulator include partial and full avionics failures, hydraulics failures, and even total electrical failures, which are rare but have happened. Some of these situations require an emergency descent from altitude—which could be as high as 51,000 feet in some bizjets—that would require substantial coordination with ATC to obtain authorization to practice this type of emergency procedure in an aircraft. The request might not be granted or might be just partially granted depending on flight activity in that ATC sector. In the simulator, not only will the requests be granted every time, but the emergency ATC calls can be practiced with realistic ATC responses.

Dealing with a medical condition on board can also be practiced more effectively in the simulator. While an instructor could tell a student to pretend a passenger or another crewmember is having a heart attack in the air and would field the pretend ATC calls, the ruse is not as effective as pulling aside a pilot before a sim session and asking him or her to suddenly become incapacitated during the flight.

“In the simulator, the workload can be modulated to be very high if needed to simulate the level of effort required in a real-world emergency, the calls to ATC are more real, and the pilot may even practice coordinating with a cabin attendant or a company’s medical provider, all while flying the sim in challenging weather or diverting to an unfamiliar airport,” said Meikle. “Sometimes you have to make a mistake to learn a lesson well, and it’s better to make that mistake in the simulator than in the aircraft.”

Another situation best practiced in the simulator is an aerodynamic stall in the traffic pattern, where the aircraft is between 1,500 and 500 feet above the ground and recovery is difficult.

“You can practice recovery from a traffic pattern stall in the aircraft by setting a specific altitude as a ‘floor,’ but it’s not as effective as in sim where you see the ‘ground’ only 700 feet below,” said Meikle.

One place that in-aircraft training shines is during upset training, where the “startle” factor may be high and the “pucker” factor even higher. Upset training teaches the pilot how to recognize and recover from unusual attitudes, such as in an unintended extreme climb or descent, often caused by distractions or emergencies in the cockpit. These can be practiced in a simulator, but the absence of g-forces and the fear factor means the skills are learned, but the visceral experience is not transferred as readily.

“When you’re pulling out of an upset recovery in an airplane and you’re looking up at the ground with a whole canopy view of nothing but dirt, it’s highly motivating,” Meikle said. “The simulator technology is really effective at creating an environment that feels so real that many pilots come out of sim sessions sweating, but feeling the g-forces add to the efficacy of the training.” FlightSafety has partnered with Flight Research International, based in Mojave, California, to provide the in-aircraft training to supplement simulator training.

Economics Often Play a Part

For some aircraft operators, these are tough times. Inflation can mean higher costs for fuel, insurance, wages, and maintenance, and simulator training is often perceived to cost more than in-aircraft training. Depending on the type of aircraft and its fuel burn, conducting a single flight to meet the checkmarks of government-required recurrent training may be cheaper than sending the pilot to simulator training, especially when factoring in travel, lodging, and meals during off-site training.

However, some of these costs can be minimized by taking the “ground school” portion of the course online. FlightSafety, for example, offers several instructor-led LiveLearning classes in a videoconferencing format that allows students to interact with the instructor and other students before they arrive at a FlightSafety Learning Center for their simulator sessions. The benefits of interaction with the instructor and other students—whether online or in the classroom—can often offset the hard costs of attending simulator training.

“There’s a benefit in seeing other pilots executing the same procedure,” said Meikle. “If you’re training in the aircraft, you usually don’t get to watch somebody else go through the same activity to observe their thought process. In the simulator, you might pick up something as simple as a method for getting ATC to stop peppering you with questions while you’re trying to deal with an emergency.”

Simulator training is also more efficient since there is little time spent flying from one spot to another to perform specific procedures, such as various approaches to landing, which require a trip around the pattern, or even to another airport for each landing. In the simulator, the instructor simply resets the program at a distance and altitude configuration that allows the student to concentrate on the next landing scenario.

There are also insurance considerations. Many insurance companies either require or provide discount incentives for simulator training, and some policies prohibit flight training in the covered aircraft.

“Insurance companies in general are risk-averse,” Meikle said. “If you conduct advanced training in your aircraft and damage occurs, the potential consequences range from out-of-service costs such as replacement aircraft during repairs, or out-of-pocket costs for deductibles and items not covered by the insurance carrier or manufacturer maintenance programs. These costs could be significant and could easily exceed the cost of the training event in the simulator.”

Another concern with in-aircraft training is that it doesn’t always correspond to standard operating procedures, which can affect both how the learning is transferred and the safety of the flight. For example, if an instructor turns off engine synchronization because he knows he is going to “fail” an engine (and doesn’t want to lose power altogether by having the other engine match the lower rpm), the student now knows an engine-failure scenario is imminent. Not only is the startle factor gone, but the “turn off engine sync” step has already been accomplished, so the student doesn’t do it in training and may not transfer that step to a real-life situation. The aircraft may also behave differently during an actual engine-out when engine sync is not disengaged. In the simulator, the instructor can fail the engine with engine sync on, so the step transfer and the experience are closer to reality.

Weather Is a Factor, Too

One of the biggest benefits of simulator training is the ability to control the weather. Training days aren’t cancelled for extreme weather; instead, simulator instructors can increase the severity of the weather gradually throughout a session, adding wind and rain as distractions or providing low visibility for more realistic instrument-flying scenarios. Wet and icy runway conditions can be simulated, as can turbulence at high and low altitudes.

“We can replicate any weather in the simulator that pilots might see in real life but that you would never deliberately train for in the aircraft,” Meikle said. “We can run wind-shear replications based on actual wind-shear accidents to train pilots how to recognize shear and fly through it.”

Night flying also presents challenges, and the sim can be set for night flying at any time. Not only can pilots use the simulator to “fly” into a particular airport at night, thus getting a good sight picture of the facility and surrounding lights, but night vision goggle (NVG) training is also available for operators like helicopter medevacs.

“The simulator visuals are just amazing,” said Meikle. “You can realistically train for everything from an off-airport medical evacuation to landing on an oil rig in a helicopter. Some simulators have night-vision technology available so when pilots look through the NVG, they see exactly what they would see in the actual aircraft.”

Some Scenarios Are Best Experienced on the Ground

While it’s true that simulator training has some limitations, countless scenarios are simply safer to experience on the ground before they happen in the air. And while rare, emergencies do occur. In 2016, a fluid spill in an Embraer ERJ 190-100 regional jet caused near total loss of electrical power in flight; the prepared crew was able to restore enough electrical power to safely land the aircraft.

“There’s a perception by some that since these abnormalities don’t happen often, pilots can get by with just receiving a checkride,” said Meikle. “But there are plenty of examples where pilots have done the training and checking in the aircraft and had a catastrophic event because they couldn’t effectively simulate or evaluate the situation in the aircraft.”