[scarier]

Story time, a decade or so ago at one of the Naval Air Stations where they conduct intermediate/advanced jet training. The base did a community outreach event where they invited the aerospace club from a local school (basically an extracurricular program where they played a lot of MSFS) to spend an afternoon in the T-45C simulator. This being Naval Aviation, each guest had the opportunity to attempt a carrier landing. Most of them sucked at it (of course they did--it's hard enough for experienced pilots). The last person to go was a tiny hispanic girl, maybe a fourth-grader. She needed to sit on a stack of NATOPS manuals like a foot thick to be able to get to the design eye height, and was unable to reach the rudder pedals or pretty much anything other than the throttle and stick. She trapped on her first try. No idea where she ended up, but I hope that she's at least had the opportunity to become a pilot by now.

Anyway, I think simulator training is fantastic procedural training (normal, emergency, and instrument procedures in particular, but a good sim with force feedback should instill good habit patterns regarding trimming the aircraft in response to throttle/configuration changes and lots of other things). I've never been impressed with full-motion sims though--lots of stick-and-rudder skills really need flight hours to build still.