Thoughts?
Certainly in the latter days of the Tornado Force they were making a lot of use of the hot pits.
The substitution of simulator training for real is certainly more complex than the bean counters and sim companies would have you believe. As JTO points out it does not exercise the whole chain, but even for the aircrew the whole sequence has to be completed for the sim to come close to being equivalent. By that I mean that to replace real flying, the sim exercise should include the boring bits: plan, brief, dress, start up, taxi, take off, transit, AAR etc etc. On the other hand, to practice specific skills the sim ability to reposition, hot start, reload etc is very useful. That sort of sortie however, is nothing like real flying and should not be claimed to be equivalent.