Originally Posted by
gianmarko
....but i also think that modern aircrafts are so damn good that we see more and more freak accidents because the "normal" ones tend to disappear.
How about this for a thought:
In the good old (bad old?) days, aircraft reliability was often so bad, and the accident/incident rate so high, that any pilot surviving to the LHS of a high-end airliner (be it jet or prop, depending on which era you're thinking of) had undoubtedly encountered at least one real life emergency - not in a simulator but a honest-to-God "if I don't do the right thing I could die" emergency. Look at the loss rates for military aviation in the 50s and 60s, where a lot of these guys had started - it was probably the exception where they hadn't known a colleague on a squadron lose his life. All those things I think perhaps taught both a respect for the engineering miracle that is aviation, and also exposed people to a decision making process that is perhaps impossible to simulate.
What I'm getting at is that once upon a time, a pilot with many thousands of hours didn't just have experience of routine flying - you could almost guarantee some pretty non-routine stuff had happened. So when your captain of your large passenger aircraft had 10k hours, say, there were a few hours in the 10k that counted for a lot more than the rest.
fast forward to today - the same guy with 10k hours might have 10k pretty uneventful hours - which overall, for the industry is great; it means the overall accident rate is much lower. But it means that the actual experience of emergencies for that pilot is almost nil - so when the emergency does happen (and its likely to be something bizarre, because the low-hanging fruit have mostly been picked by now) not only are the crew faced by a condition that may be exceptional in engineering terms, they also are faced by an environment (a true 'emergency') which is itself exceptional for them.
If that is the case, the question becomes how one addresses the 'gap' in terms of experience of emergencies? Is it feasible to do it by simulation? (My guess is not really). Just throwing this out there ....