alf: Interesting; and hence my thoughts as a question not a fact. I agree about the sim limitations and our reluctance to overcome what our eyes have been trained to do over many years; plus the startle/stress element of such a scenario.
And that brings us back to the use of simulators and showing crews what gotchas & traps are out there; so enforcing your comment about we might experience similar situations in training and flag the need for caution when encountered in operation, e.g. after 'seeing' (understanding). I think simulators are under-used in this way. One can show many real life events in this way. In there briefing phase you can go thought the 'what if' discussion and then demo it and let the crew play; it does not need to be a full LOFT, just enough to get the point across and let them see the dangers and realise the limitations: e..g the blocked static vent on the Peru B757. Let the crews experience what confusion is caused by the instruments appearing to oppose their inputs and 'teach' what to do about it. A full blown LOFT takes a long time, and in that same time you could introduce various scenarios and thus impart a much larger amount of knowledge & understanding for use should any of them ever happen.
After the B777 SFO some TC's said they told their students about the trap in the A/T. Did they demo it? Difficult on the line. How many airlines now include it in their TR syllabus as an exercise? There are numerous other gotchas we've seen, and after the crash of serious incident we discover it was not the first time in the world. After the AB landing in the trees at Basle; how many airlines include that trap in the TR? Did it not happen again in India? Maybe slight differences in reason, but it still landed short of the runway in idea as the crew watched in horror.
How many G/A's have led to crashes, or near crashes, due to a gross out of trim situation of a mis trimming. Enough to introduce it as sim demo exercise don't you think.
I always used to learn more from my mistakes than successes. A simulator is a great tool for showing what can go wrong, how easy it is for it to go wrong, what it looks like when it goes wrong, how to escape from it and how to avoid the trap in the first place.
This goes well beyond the tick box 3.4 on the training syllabus, but it'll keep you safe well into the future.
Let's use the tools we've got to more effect and to their full potential. More training less box ticking.