Is Your Life Worth More Than Airline Profits? (w/Guest Charles Sauer)

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Guess what: Commercial pilots already train in simulators.

They have for years. The simulators themselves are highly regulated by the FAA to replicate the exact flight characteristics and system malfunctions of the aircraft itself, and those regulations are about as strict as the ones that govern actual airplanes. At major airlines a pilot who is transitioning to another airplane or a new hire pilot will be trained on entirely on a simulator, and that pilot's first flight in the actual airplane he or she was trained on will be a revenue flight carrying passengers. This is the way airlines have trained pilots for at least 30 years, or ever since the technology improved enough that accurate simulation was possible. I've spent a fair amount of time in full-motion flight simulators, and they are hair-raisingly realistic. They are also extremely expensive, and their programming and maintenance isn't cheap either.

Beginning pilot training should be in a real airplane, of course; these are typically something like a Cessna 172. It would be more expensive to design and build an accurate C-172 simulator than to buy the actual airplane so I don't see that ever happening. But if airlines used the real thing for training nobody would ever be able to afford a plane ticket again.