Hi all!
I would like to bring this thread back up now. The reason ?
Well, I still do think that given a nice weather and otherwise good circumstances, an experienced non-licensed simulator "pilot" could pull this off.
I'm not going to spend any more time in trying to convince people with minute details about every other system that I know how to use in _theory" and in a pc sim (the pic767).
But I will say this. Yesterday I spent 2½ hours in a full motion B757 simulator. So did a friend of mine who has never even steered a Cessna for real. End result ? Many successful hand-flown approaches and landings, with and without the f/d. Some 30 and 45 degree turn practice and a couple of stalls. Plus some other stuff. What is interesting is that neither me or my friend had trouble in keeping the jet in a somewhat stabilized ILS approach (max dev. ½ dot) manually, and then performing a succesfull landing. Also, we didn't use the autopilot to stabilize the approaches, but everything from FLAPS1 was done manually, with A/T off as well.
I had LOTS of fun (and I know I wouldn't have any fun in the situation that would result from both pilots becoming incapacitated), and I'm still not pretending to be anything I'm not. I realize that the real pilots do not train to fly from A to B safely, they train to do it SAFELY in the most disturbing weather with severe malfunctions present as well. But..., now I know what the almost real thing feels like...
. Our host, a 757 training captain, told us that the sim they are using feels like 99.5% real. I'll let him be the judge of that...
Comments anyone ? And let's keep this interesting and civil, heheh...
rgds
Tero