Airline simulators aren't up to scratch

[Agent X20]

While the article is undoubtedly biased the following is still a worrying situation:

Even after a string of errors left their turboprop fluttering above suburban Buffalo, the pilots aboard Colgan Air Flight 3407 could have recovered with a few quick maneuvers.
Instead, Capt. Marvin Renslow and co-pilot Rebecca Shaw overrode a safety device designed to save them and worsened the aerodynamic stall causing the plane to plummet.

The behavior of the pilots in the Feb. 12, 2009, crash that killed 50 people has become an all-too-familiar response when airliners go out of control, according to National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) records. Over and over again, startled pilots mishandle stalls, icing and other emergencies.

One key reason is that pilots do not receive simulator training on how to handle such emergencies, according to the NTSB, pilot unions and aerodynamic experts.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010- ... side_N.htm

[_RAAF_Stupot]

It's a little bit hard to comment on this without knowing exactly what sort of training regime Colgan Air had, and also what type of simulator they used for training.

My father is a retired QANTAS pilot, and the first time he ever touched a 747-400 in real life was on a fare-carrying service. The entire conversion training from the classic Jumbos was done on the simulator. And there isn't really that much in common between the old-school Jumbos and the 400's except for external appearance. Obviously the cockpits are different, but so is the entire performance envelope, the 400 even touches down on the runway in a different attitude.....

My dad is old fashioned and he had a lot of bad things to say about the usability of the 'glass cockpit', much as we often complain about the usability of Windows.....one story he often likes to repeat is the first time he played around with the flight management computer on the 400. This computer will give you a great circle distance between any two locations on earth. So because he knew off by heart the lat and long of Sydney Airport, he entered the opposite coordinates to get the distance from Sydney to the opposite side of the earth. Expecting about 20 000 km he got an error message instead. Not impressed!

But despite all that you can't really argue against the statistics - air travel is safer than it has ever been, most accidents are caused by the pilot, and glass cockpit aircraft are statistically safer than the old aircraft.