May I quote the following description of severe turbulence offered by an unknown pilot and mentioned in ""Handling The Big Jets" by D.P Davies. His book first published in April 1967 remains the finest yet I have read on jet flying. Yet from my experience very few of today's current airline pilots have ever read it - even though it is still available in most pilot shops. The chapter is No 8 and the title of the chapter "Flight Through Severe Weather." It says, quote:
"We encountered the most violent jolt I have ever experienced in over 20,000 hours of flying.
I felt as though an extremely severe positive, upward acceleration had triggered off a buffetting, not a pitch, that increased in frequency and magnitude as one might expect to encounter sitting on the end of a huge tuning fork that had been struck violently.
Not an instrument on any panel was readable to their full scale but appeared as white blurs against their dark background.
From that point on, it could have been 10, 20, 60 or 100 seconds, we had no idea of attitude, altitude, airspeed or heading. We were now on instruments with no visual reference and continued with severe to violent buffetting, ripping, tearing, rending crashing sounds. Briefcases, manuals, ashtrays, suitcases, pencils, cigarettes, flahlights flying around like unguided misslies. It sounded and felt as if the pods were leaving and the structure disintegrating.
The objects that were thrashing around the cockpit seemed to mementarily settle on the ceiling which made it impossible to trust one's senses - although I had a feeling we were inverted as my seat belt was tight and had stretched considerably. As my briefcase was on the ceiling, I looked up and through the overhead (eyebrow) window and felt that I was looking down on the top of a cloud deck. The first officer said later he had the same impression at the same instant we acted in unison applying as much force as we could gather to roll aileron control to the left.
The horizon bar at this time started to stabilise and showed us coming back through 90 degrees vertical to a level attitude laterally. At this time, I had my first airspeed reading decaying through 250 knots. The air smoothed out and we gently levelled off at between 1400 - 1500 feet...."
Unquote.
Hard to imagine after reading that, that some airlines do not allow unusual attitude recovery training in the simulator on the grounds that it will never happen. Reading from that extract from an airline pilot's report, it is obvious that instrument interpretation played a vital part in the recovery. Even a Microsoft PC Flight Simulator will allow instrument interpretation skills related to unusual attitudes to be practiced.