[swingbridge]

Simulators are great for training on emergency scenarios that can't easily or safely be done in a real airplane, or practicing and learning new avionics or systems but they shouldn't be a substitute for real flying experience. This is a bad decision.

[userbinator]

There is also this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulator_sickness

No simulator can recreate the forces experienced in a real plane exactly, and it can be very disorienting and nauseating. As a simple example, consider a plane accelerating down the runway for takeoff --- that feeling of thrust that pushes you back into the seat can't be simulated. I have severe motion sickness and can't do things like play FPS, simulators, or watch videos with lots of movement in my field of vision without becoming very dizzy and fatigued. VR and 3D only makes it worse. Yet I have no problems driving or riding in a real plane.

[annerajb]

As a pilot that is learning. Why can't a simulator recreate the real flying experience? Especially on this fly by wire aircrafts?

[rsync]

"I was just settling down with my book and I felt the airplane do a very odd maneuver. We could feel the airplane doing something very significant and abnormal."[1][2]

Human brains are amazing things that, with no special effort - only practice and repetition - can combine a huge number of disparate inputs to synthesize the "feel" of something.

The airplane is a physical thing and it has "a feel". A good pilot (or jockey or surgeon or fighter or truck driver) has a tremendous amount of stored information and experience related to "the feel" of what they are doing. We would be vastly worse off (and less safe) if we discounted that human ability and fooled ourselves into believing that simulation can ever match the experience of doing a thing in the physical world.

[1] http://jalopnik.com/5629528/how-i-saved-a-747-from-crashing

[drittich]

Completely putting aside the question of the quality of the simulation of the aircraft and physics involved, one possible reason is that simulations can remove extreme emotions from the equation. The pilot knows they won't die in the simulator if they make an error. (This can be both a positive and negative gain.)

To take it to the extreme, would you be willing to attempt landing a real 747 solo, having only ever flown using simulators?

[venomsnake]

I will be willing to do it. I won't be willing to be present in an aircraft while someone elae does it. Not because I am a pilot - just I am ok with dying from my own mistake.