Co-pilots May Sim instead of Fly to Train

Mxsmanic wrote:
Kev writes:
On the one hand, you could argue that with say, the Airbus computer
overrides, even a non-pilot passenger could handle the sidestick and
throttles and never stall in the air.

The flip side is that, with Airbus, even an experienced pilot can
crash. These are the unavoidable and interlocked advantages and
disadvantages of fly-by-wire systems that have no full overrides.

An experienced pilot can crash any aircraft, so that's no argument.
The upside of the Airbus system is that the plane can automatically
avoid the most common death traps, like stalls on go-around or
microbursts.

On the other hand, I'm always reminded of that story in one of the
pilot mags a few years back, about the fully loaded 747 taking off from
SFO. It lost an engine right away, and the young co-pilot tried to use
the yoke instead of the rudder to straighten out. [..]
They missed a mountain by mere feet. Moral of the story? I dunno

How had the co-pilot been trained? A simulator would have behaved
just like the real thing, so that could not be the source of his error.

That's why I said I don't know the moral of the story At first, I
wanted to argue that more real-life training before moving to airliners
would've helped. But his reaction was par for a twin engine piston
with a dead engine, where banking into the good engine is not uncommon.
So you could argue that if he'd only ever been trained on a 747 sim,
he might've not had that tendency to use the yoke.

Kev