Why would you want to avoid the sim? It's one of the best training aids there are. No one is going to say it's the same as an aircraft, but the whole point is that you can simulate things much easier in a sim. Another advantage of the sim is that if you stuff it up, at one click of a button you can reset and have another go. In an aircraft it could take 10 mins to reposition to have another run, at £6 a min that's quite wasteful.