That’s a fascinating insight. I look forward to real pilots chiming in on whether this is a realistic scenario. Can thousands of hours on a sim and 40-50 hours in a jet really produce a competent pilot?
I bought one flight simulator for my Mac SE back around 1988. It was a WW 2 Pacific theater combat simulator. You can imagine how primitive it was. A few years later my wife got me MS Flight Sim which was a staggering leap forward. But even that was primitive compared to what today’s sims do.
I don’t disagree flight simulators can are better then they have ever been, but flight simulation vs cockpit time, particularly in combat simulation I think would be very different.
You aren’t fighting multiple G’s in a flight simulator.
Not that simulators offer nothing, clearly they do, but I’d be hard pressed to believe a pilot who’s been trained in a simulator is going to be on par with one who’s actually done combat training in a real jet.
I’ll yield to the folks who have hands on experience, but I am hard pressed to believe that simulators put you on par with actually flying a combat aircraft... They certainly can lessen the amount of actual time needed in the aircraft, as you can learn how to do the basics with less time in the plane, but fully substitute for flight hours in combat situations? Unless flying the jets remotely, I really really don’t think you can simulate the G forces and other things you are going to experience in actual flight
Sure we can spin you around fast enough to simulate multiple G’s, but we can’t apply multiple g’s to you instantaneously when you do something in a simulator that would result in that load on your body, etc.
Simulator instructors told us that the simulators for more advanced aircraft were harder to fly than the actual airplanes because they put less money into the simulators.
The simulators also let you fly most airfields around the world, and some of them are quite interesting.
Simulators would also allow pilots to train for scenarios that normally take thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to coordinate, such as this drill in Taiwan where they use highways as runways:
