We’re taking off from Salt Lake City on Runway 16L. It’s my leg. It’s a foggy day with visibility reported at 500 feet. Anything less than 500 and the Captain would have to do the takeoff using his Heads Up Display, but I’m legal to go with what we’ve got.
“You have the aircraft” he says.
“I have the aircraft. Set standard power.”
“Standard power set.”
“80 knots.”
“Checked.”
“V1….rotate.”
“Ba-bam!” as the nose swings hard to the right.
“Engine failure!”
OK, step on the rudder, maintain centerline, rotate smoothly to 12 degrees nose up. Try to hold runway heading.
“Positive rate. Gear up!”
Damn this thing is barely climbing! We’re maybe 300 feet off the ground, in the weather with terrain all around. This sucks!
Fortunately this happened to me in the simulator and not the aircraft.
An engine failure coming out of Salt Lake City would be a handful. It’s a high altitude airport so performance is degraded and there is high terrain in every direction. The only “escape route” when taking off to the south is to make a 180 degree turn up the valley. If that sounds like your idea of fun, try Bogota sometime.
This is why we have simulators.
Once every nine months I’m required to spend two days in the simulator while a graduate of the Marquis de Sade School of Instruction tests my abilities.
Engine failures. Stuck flaps. Systems failures. Wind shear. Near midair. High crosswinds. Cargo fires. You name it, they’ve thrown it at me.
Now normally I’d be paired with a Captain who is getting a check ride at the same time. For reasons of scheduling I have a “support” Captain who’s just there to occupy the left seat while I take all the beatings. Good thing I enjoy pain.
We’re taking off from Memphis with a massive thunderstorm just off the end of the runway. Very unrealistic because I’d have taken one look at the forecast and called in sick that day.
1,500 feet off the ground we’re hit by a massive windshear. We probably lose 50 knots of airspeed in about a second and the plane stalls and drops like a brick. I slam the thrust levers to the firewall and push the yoke forward to break the stall. We start flying again except now we’ve gone from way too nose high to way to nose low and I have a windshield full of Planet Earth. I make what I guess is a 2 G pull up but it’s hard to tell in the simulator. We overspeed everything but fly out of it. I saw 800 feet on the radar altimeter before we pulled out. Good thing Memphis doesn’t have many tall buildings.
During the debrief the sadist instructor tells me that most people just nose over and crash during that one. It’s like the “Kobayashi Maru” no-win scenario from Star Trek.
Flight simulators have been around for a very long time. My research tells me that the original Link Trainer was built in 1929. The old Link Trainer was actually quite advanced for its day. It used a series of electrically powered bellows to provide motion. There was even a motor to simulate turbulence. The student’s position was electro-mechanically plotted for the instructor.
The reasons for using simulators should be fairly obvious. The big one is that it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the real thing.
I had a tough time researching how much an hour of sim time costs, because most simulator rentals include an instructor. But let’s say an hour of full-motion simulator time costs $1,000 on average. An hour of flight time in an actual 767 will cost you at least $5,000 in fuel alone at today’s prices. That doesn’t factor in maintenance cost and the loss of revenue from taking a jet out of service so you can bounce it off the runway for an hour.
Then there’s the safety aspect. We can practice things in the simulator that would be illegal or just downright insane to attempt in a real jet. The simulator also allows us to fine-tune the weather for practicing low visibility approaches. If you set the simulator for 1200 foot visibility you get exactly 1200 foot visibility, not 1201 and not 1199.
Today’s simulators are pretty damn good. The FAA says a landing in the simulator is as good as landing the real jet. While it’s pretty close, I can tell you that I have yet to fly a simulator that feels exactly like the real thing. That’s my excuse anyway. My simulator landings can best be described as “within limits”.
The first simulator I flew in the Air Force was an older T-37 simulator. The visuals were provided by a camera “flying” over a large table that held a model of the terrain. “Crashing” the sim would would cause the camera to hit the table and break. I don’t think we were allowed to land the sim because it was so different from the real jet that it would be negative training.
I recall the T-38 simulator as being better. The visuals were about what you’d expect from 1980’s technology. As a T-38 instructor I probably spent about a quarter of my time instructing in the simulator. It was a decent tool for teaching instrument flying and practicing emergency procedures.
We had several simulators in the B-52. The primary one was called the Weapons Part-Task Trainer (I think). It was actually three simulators networked together, fancy stuff for the 1980’s. One for the pilots, one for the navigators and one for the gunner and EWO. We could fly a complete mission in that simulator and even be attacked by simulated fighters.
The other sim that I got very familiar with was the Air Refueling Part-Task Trainer. This thing had an actual model of a tanker, mounted vertically on rails. A camera would travel along the rails, giving us a view of the “tanker” from the cockpit. One prankster put a model of the Millennium Falcon on strings and would occasionally fly it by the camera just to mess with us.
The ARPTT worked pretty well, but still wasn’t the same as the real deal. I can remember my B-52 instructor saying “You can refuel the ARPTT upside down but you still can’t get a contact in the jet.” Note that it was my seventh or eighth training sortie in the B-52 before I actually got hooked up to the tanker.
I’ve been out of the game for a long time but I understand the military has some pretty amazing simulators today. They have one where the pilot sits under a dome and can dogfight a pilot in another simulator.
As military aircraft keep getting more expensive, it makes sense to do more training in the simulators. Someday probably everything will be unmanned and the computers will just fight it out and tell us who won. I remember that being the plot of one of the better Star Trek episodes.
For you tech junkies out there, I had the opportunity to talk to one of our sim technicians. Since I have an IT background I wasn’t completely lost. The simulators run on either a Windows or Unix/Linux operating system and mostly use C++ for the programming. Some of the older ones are still running FORTRAN (there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while).
The flight models are based on test data from the actual plane. Some of the data is extrapolated, meaning nobody has ever been crazy enough to do this in the actual jet so the engineers took their best guess as to how it would work.
For example: the instructor has me put the plane into a full stall, pulling the yoke way past the point where the stick-shaker goes off. All the way back in my lap. You would hopefully never see this in a real 767 and I doubt that anyone ever has.
If the extrapolated data is to be believed, it was a very non-violent maneuver. The “plane” just fell like a leaf, with a gentle wing rocking that was easily controlled with the yoke. Very much like a full aft-stick stall in a T-38, which we did practice in the jet.
For our recurrent training we do two types of simulator profiles. The first one is the “maneuver validation” which is where they throw various problems at us for four hours. I’m usually physically and mentally exhausted after one of those. The profile isn’t always realistic, because the sim instructor will keep “zapping” us back to the runway for another takeoff or back to final for another approach.
The other one we do is called a “line-oriented evaluation”, which is pretty realistic. We’ll do a full “flight” from pre-flight to shutdown. They’ll throw a couple of things at us along the way, but it’s mostly a flight from Point A to Point B except something will probably make us divert to Point C.
Most full-motion simulators stand on large hydraulic legs, looking like one of the Martian tripods from War of the Worlds. They do a pretty good job of making it feel like you’re flying. Push the thrust levers up on the runway and it will tilt back to make you feel acceleration. Stomp on the brakes and it will tilt forward to throw you in the straps.
One of our 767 simulators uses pneumatics instead of hydraulics and has been troublesome from day one. The motion was really bad early on and it damn near made me airsick the first time I “flew” it. I think we bought it from the lowest bidder and then spent a fortune over the years to make it work right. Typical case of corporate bean-counters stepping over a pile of $10 bills to pick up a nickel.
I get to do four simulator sessions, two every nine months, on an eighteen month training cycle. It used to be every six months, but you know, money.
I won’t say I enjoy the simulator, after all it is a check ride and my job is on the line, but the training is definitely useful.
The biggest benefit of simulator training is being able to practice abnormal procedures in a safe environment. Airline flying is for the most part pretty boring, and that’s how we like it.
The day something bad happens for real, hopefully it won’t be “Oh sh*t!”
Who am I kidding? It will still be “Oh sh*t!” but at least it will be followed by “Oh yeah, I saw this in the simulator”.
Some additional simulator training might have prevented the recent 737 MAX accidents. If Boeing hadn’t tried to talk the airlines out of it. And if Boeing had actually told anyone about MCAS. And if Boeing had actually designed the thing right in the first place.
Even with all that, the crew is still the last line of defense. Sim training at least gives us a fighting chance.
Now some of you might ask me “What’s a good flight simulator program?” Good old Microsoft Flight Simulator isn’t bad, but I think it’s long overdue for an update. I think there’s a Flight Sim 2020 in the works. I haven’t messed with X Plane 11 but it looks pretty good.
If you ever decide that you have too much money and free time, you can build a pretty amazing home simulator from mostly off-the-shelf parts.
I sometimes joke that the most realistic airline career simulator is the treadmill at the hotel gym. I’m away from home, I’m working my ass off, I never move forward and it gets harder the longer I do it.