Quote:
Originally Posted by
CONF iture 
Dani, what is that FCOM reference that could explain I was not able to get a forward autotrim ?
And yet on the A320 sim I did. Have you tried talking to the sim engineers about that one?
As one who has spent my entire career working on, designing and programming simulators (admittedly my "bit" is the sound and comms bit, just so you get the full picture), any assumption regarding a specific edge-case operation should not be trusted on the sim until verified and checked against aircraft operation OR double-checked against aircraft data (assuming doing it on the plane is either dangerous or really difficult). I routinely find issues on certified and in-service-for-years simulators that were not caught or identified during routine operation and certification testing.
While the manufacturer of any simulator will aim for 100% accuracy, the available data is routinely found lacking, hence my cautionary note above. What may seem surprising to some is the fact that the data package supplied by the airframe manufacturer will vary from one customer to another - I recently worked two 737 platforms for different customers, and received different data from each, for the same system. Not entirely different, but 5% was. Eventually I was able to get the same consistent data, but I was lucky since I had access to two sources.
Aside from those parts of the sim using rehosted aircraft code (which has it's own issues), the device trusted for training is the result of hundreds of thousand of lines of code from a motley collection of software engineers, that typically do not follow anywhere near the same rigid procedures and practices employed when writing aircraft-bound code (costs alone would not permit). This is not to say they are not doing a great job, but trusting the sim blindly, in particular in areas extrapolated beyond the aircraft data or figured out by analysis of airframer supplied data, warrant second and third opinions before assuming the behavior is correct.
- GY
