Firstly thanks to all who have contributed, much of what has been said is not unexpected based on my personal contact with flight crew, but if I can redirect a little...
Is it fair to say that the new standard (ICAO 9625 rev 3 link per original post) does not address unusual attitude recovery and similar, and as such "we" (meaning anyone who contributed to the creation of that document - myself included, but admittedly only for a small slice constrained by my expertise) missed an opportunity to move this issue forward.
Personally it seems logical that any training in this area is better than no training, but one mantra that is relevant is the need to avoid negative training. What I suspect is the case here is over-protectionism at work - in other words, since we cannot get real aircraft data to base our modeling on (since that is inherently dangerous) then we can't train it, and/or don't want to, and by the way there are very few living pilots to verify what the simulator might do anyway. This of course is ignoring the fact that we CAN develop VERY REALISTIC engineering models for aircraft in all flight attitudes/conditions (remember computing power and indeed engineers to program them are relatively cheap).
May flight simulators are developed for aircraft that have not flown one NM - there were A380 FFS long before the first aircraft flew, and the same is true for the 787 currently. True enough that those sims are updated with revised aero packages once the aircraft are in the air, but having seen this from the inside, these updates are very minor - the original engineering models are very, very good.
So I would venture it is possible to get representative data to use as the modeling basis.
It is unavoidable that the motion system cannot replicate the full experience; at best it provides
cues as to what happens, but again, given we can't have you hanging off the straps, wouldn't it be better to have some idea of what will/might happen in an upset situation, versus none?
I'd venture as a frequent flyer, I'd prefer the folks at the pointy end to have some training, since not having any at all seems rather like rolling dice... and just recently I experienced a roller-coaster ride in the pan-handle region of Northern Florida, that had me hoping the flight deck crew were ex-military, since having worked with many such folk, I am pretty confident they would have likely the right experience AND training to handle what we flew through. Not that many/most of the non-military flight deck crews couldn't have handled themselves just fine, but I KNOW this is not part of the normal training syllabus, and that was pretty much front and center in my mind as we bounced our way to a (fortunately) very safe landing. And please understand I absolutely want to be clear this paragraph is not intended to denigrate the flying skills of the very many non ex-military crews - it is the training basis for those skills I am focused on here.
- GY