Thunder Child,
The ability to land 0/0 has been around for a long time.
Trident did it a long time ago .. easy as falling off a log. Most of the recent airliners can do an autoland in the same way.
Many of the HUD installations enable it to be done with ease.
With a bit of practice in the sim and reasonably good conditions, the average jock can hand fly a raw data approach in 0/0 to a full stop on or fairly near to the centreline. While you might have found MS FS a bit difficult without any of the full flight feedback cues, it is really a doddle in the sim with a bit of practice... and an excellent stick and rudder I/F scan skills exercise. I am reliably informed that, in years gone past, one of Europe's mail service's pilots routinely would fly in minima which the rest of us only marvel at ....
So why don't these latter events occur routinely in the real world ?
A lack of system redundancy, monitoring and demonstrated satisfactory risk numbers is the key to the difference between what might be able to be done and what is permitted to be done under a particular State's regulations. If the overall system's capability to land with a high level of safety (low level of risk) is not up to it, then we ought not to be doing it in a commercial environment.
In respect of routine low vis procedures (Cat 2/3A, for instance) it perhaps is not entirely as simple as BlueEagle suggests as crews need to be trained for the case where an aircraft systems failure (or wx deterioration) occurs after a point where a miss can be taken without too much risk eg. the vis goes to zero halfway through the landing roll. Clearly, the crew has to be able to complete the landing blind .. and sim exercises are structured to provide the skills and confidence to do so.
However, for the planning stage, it really is a matter of risk levels which drive the regulatory processes ..
Last edited by john_tullamarine; 6th September 2002 at 05:10.