Kingfish writes:

An unrealistic comparison, I think. An airline pilot with 5000hrs of
real-world experience has spent a significant number of hours getting
beat up annually in a simulator exposed to a wide array of emergencies,
simple and compound.

That would count as simulator experience. I said 5000 hours of
real-world experience.

The average airliner pilot has spent vastly more time in a real
cockpit fighting off boredom than in a simulator coping with
emergencies.

Simulators are an excellent (and necessary) part
of pilot training, but there are situations that can never be
simulated ...

A lot more situations can be simulated than experienced in real life
(if one wishes to survive the experience), and it is thanks to
simulators that pilots are better prepared for emergencies today.
Many of the things they practice on simulators would never be safe to
attempt in real life, and others are so rare that they are never
likely to see them (but at least they'll be prepared if they do).

In modern commercial air travel, which is very safe, there are many
emergencies that no pilot has ever experienced in real life; this
being so, it is impossible for a pilot to depend on any real-world
experience when dealing with such emergencies, since it is
overwhelmingly probable that he is seeing such an emergency for the
first time. Simulation greatly improves survival rates for such
emergencies by giving pilots experience with them in the safe but
realistic environment of a simulator. Without that simulation
experience, quite a few of them would be killed when the real thing
comes along. The real world doesn't train you for potentially deadly
emergencies.

... and it is their real-world experience that pilots call upon
to save their aircraft when the shiite hits the fan.

They don't _have_ any relevant real-world experience. That's why they
try simulation.

The best example I can think of is United #232 (Sioux City, 1989). I
doubt Al Haines was ever trained to control a DC-10 without hydraulic
power to the flight control surfaces. Yet he managed to steer the jet
with differential thrust to a (scary) landing without the loss of all
aboard.

Actually, there were four people controlling the plane, and it was
being steered by a DC-10 flight instructor who had been deadheading on
the flight.

None of them had any previous experience with anything like this at
all, so both real-world and simulator experience were irrelevant
(although I seem to recall that the instructor had pondered similar
scenarios in the past, but had not tried them).

The crew succeeded in part because of proper CRM, not because of
technical skills with something this foreign. They can (and do) learn
CRM in simulators, rather than in real life where it can be dangerous.

Luck also played a substantial role in this crash. The combined 103
hours of experience of the flight deck crew was definitely a factor,
but it was experience that could have been acquired in either real
life or a simulator. It was important in keeping them calm and
cooperative and organized; flying the plane was only a small part of
it.

See

http://www.airdisaster.com/eyewitness/ua232.shtml

to learn the details, including the correct spelling of the captain's
name.

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