Was the Washington 737 accident not proven with substantial input from the simulator.
Do you mean the US Air 427 crash out of PIT?
The Idaho DC10 accident was replicated in the simulator
I think you mean the Iowa crash, UAL 232 at SUX - Sioux City (
http://www.flysux.com/).
Regardless of the geography, those crashes are a couple of the first that come to my mind on this topic. Sims were used to test theories about handling with catastrophic system failures.
Gone are the days when you heard "I've got a Base Check next week so I'm going to do a bit of manual flying". It had got to the stage where we were using the aircraft to practice for the sim, ie, often using an inappropriate level of automation.
Those days aren't gone everywhere. I do have mixed feelings when the other pilot hand flies to FL330. It's great that they are maintaining stick and rudder skills but it puts a higher workload on the monitoring pilot and narrows situational awareness. Of course, if we are flying a European SID with noise abatement and a low transition altitude, I'm a little firmer about getting the autopilot on so we can run the store. Also, stick time helps some when you get to the sim, but most of us spend the first hour relearning how to fly the box.