Jet Upset Training - For or Against.
There are differing opinions on the perceived value of unusual attitude recovery training in simulators. Personally I am all for it, particularly having seen experienced airline pilots who should know better, not having a clue how to recover to right way up after being placed inverted during simulator training.
The argument against unusual attitude recovery training is that the simulator does not replicate the real thing. Control forces may be different and aircraft behaviour unknown, because no test pilot is going to risk an aircraft in such extreme manoeuvres.
Some advise that the next best thing is to learn aerobatics in a flying school aircraft and use those techniques where necessary to recover in a Boeing type for example. But again we are faced with the same argument as before and that is the Boeing type may not react on recovery in the same way as a light aircraft would.
Accepting the conservative premise that extreme unusual attitude recoveries should not be practiced in the simulator for fear of getting the wrong gen, then do we close our eyes and say it will never happen to me and thus no need to be prepared?
Or do we accept our gut feeling that yes - you can barrel roll a 707 successfully (ever see the photo of the Boeing test pilot way back in the Fifties doing a demo barrel roll on the prototype 707?) and you could do the same thing in a 737 too (maybe?) and get away with it. So very probably you could barrel roll the 737 in a simulator and recover very nicely, thank you very much. And its a fair bet that the real thing would be almost the same as the simulator.
That said, surely the value of the simulator in training for unusual attitude recoveries is the knowledge of the flight instrument indications when in an extreme attitude such as full inverted (behind the wake turbulence of an A380 maybe).
A barrel roll in a simulator is not only a good lark - but there can be serious lessons learned here in sky-pointer positioning, rate of roll recovery, basic flight instrument indications, rate of speed decay, increase and so on. There must be more value in this than learning jet upset recovery from a picture book or theory manual.
If one accepts that in real life the control forces on recovery may be different, and that what matters is the quick identication of the position you have found yourself in, and which way is the quickest to get wings level, then we should not ignore the importance of unusual attitude recovery training in the simulator - despite it's limitations.
If aerobatic practice in a light aircraft is considered good training for jet upset recovery notwithstanding control force differences, why not the same principle for the flight simulator using the actual flight instruments as in the Boeing etc?