fighter pilot hours?

Also, to
what extent can good simulators replace flying time?

Krztalizer wrote:
It still doesn't entirely replace flight hours, it only augments them.
There
are darn few "good simulators" that can remotely compare to the real
thing, and
this was over 30 years ago,

phil hunt wrote:
Presumably they are better now than then.
snippage
Simulators -- assuming a good mathematical model of the airplane --
should be able to correctly simulate how it would respond to
anything the pilot does. The visual part of simulation is mostly
solved these days due to good computer power. The hard thing, as I
see it, is simulating the effect of the aircraft's movements on the
pilot.

A very nontrivial challenge.

When positive G is modeled by inflating your g-suit and negative G
by inflating a "whoopie cushion" under the driver's butt or dropping
the sim a foot or two, that ain't very useful. Numerous crashes
have been attributed to pilots flying the airplane too soon after being
in the sim (Miramar had a mandatory delay between 'flying' the
WST and getting in a real airplane). Your body gets used to what
ought to happen to it in the Real Thing (tm), then gets confused by
the sim. Minutia such as rate of G application get missed by the sim
but have tremendous significance in flight.

Sims are great for buttonology and procedures, and can be a lot of
fun (and they can scare the hell out of you sometimes). But they do
NOT teach you how to really push the plane to its and your limits
(low-level flight in a non-permissive environment, for one simple
example), and that's the key to surviving in the Real World.

We've seen it again and again--try to save money in the training
environment and you guarantee increased losses in combat.


Jeff