Back in the second half of the 1960's, my parents built a new house in a development on the edge of my hometown. The airport was ~5 miles away, and we could literally see it out our back window (sadly they eventually built up behind us blocking the view
). Back then, a major US operator did pilot training there - I spent untold hours sitting on the dirt mounds behind my house watching 727s do simulated engine out approaches, go-arounds, touch and goes, etc. (the smoke trails behind the JT8Ds made it readily apparent if the engine was being used - I've always assumed the engines were at idle rather than being shutdown). Effective I'm sure, also rather expensive and undoubtedly rather risky. The landing pattern routed them directly over all four schools in my neighborhood (two elementary, junior high, and high school) as well as my house. We used to joke that if one went down, they wanted it to be sure it made headlines
.
We do much of our flight testing out of Moses Lake (central Washington) which used to be a SAC bomber base with a
long runway. Thirty years ago, we would share the airfield with JAL, who kept at least one 747 there for crew training (during a 767 flight test/photo shoot, we very nearly had a mid-air with a JAL 747 that was coming in for a landing while we were taking off the opposite direction
).
Of course now days, nearly all of that training is done in simulators - with obvious cost savings and it's certainly much safer (I've yet to hear of anyone getting hurt when they crashed the simulator
). But I've also noticed that many (most?) simulators are fixed - full motion simulators being far more costly.
Have we gone too far in the simulation direction?