Originally Posted by
737 Driver
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There was a time in my aviation career when one would be subjected to the whims of a sadistic simulator instructor whose only job was to present you with a host of malfunctions and upsets to which there was only one correct initial response: Turn off the magic, set the pitch, set the power, monitor the performance, trim the aircraft, move to a safe altitude. You did this again and again and again until it was impressed upon you that there will come a time when you really have no clue what is going on and that the only safe harbor was, Turn off the magic, set the pitch, set the power, monitor the performance, trim the aircraft, move to a safe altitude. After some passage of time without sufficient evidence that this was a "cost-effective" use of sim time, this type of relatively unstructured training was replaced with what has largely become a set of scripts consisting of known problems and known answers.
Sadly this sounds like far too many of my friends' airline training protocol. We've all done far too many V1 cuts and single-engine approaches to count yet rarely do we see unique and creative scenarios that are not immediately solved by a checklist procedure. This must change, but I fear that the future trend is toward pilots as systems monitors with high reliance on automation and away from airmanship.