Originally Posted by
Speed of Sound
Do we have anyone on here who designs/maintains flight simulators?
The Reuters report says that the ‘additional issues’ were discovered in the sim. Is the hardware in a flight sim identical to the actual hardware in the aircraft? As a flight simulator is primarily a training aid and not a test bed for hardware I would assume that the simulator system hardware emulates, and software models what is in the aircraft, rather than being identical to the actual circuits and microprocessors found on the aircraft.
If this is the case then great care should be taken in drawing any hardware deficiency conclusions away from an actual flying aircraft.
Aviation Week reports that the tests were conducted in Boeing's engineering flight simulator (i.e. a testing platform, not a training device), so I suspect that from a system standpoint they were emulating the aircraft hardware and software as much as feasible.