In the US, the FAA requires a substantial number of hours in an actual aircraft before you can be rated as a private pilot. Specifically, FAR 61.109 says a maximum of 5 hours of simulator time can be counted towards the 40 hours of flight time required for the rating.
My question is, why?
We have hit the point where simulators like Redbird's VTO can (they claim) realistically teach you to hover and do autorotations for $150,000. If the hardware (motion + visuals) is up to teaching hovering and autorotations, I'm curious how much it could take to get the model of the aircraft accurate enough to simulate all the required maneuvers?
As it is, unless you are a very large training academy or university, it probably doesn't make sense to purchase a simulator, because you can credit so few hours towards the rating. That in turn limits the numbers of simulators being sold, so companies like Redbird are far and few between, and also they probably can't afford the same level of detail to their simulation model that you can in a $10M sim. If the market for certified simulators was larger, we'd see more capable simulators for less money. The hardware is demonstrably up to the task for much less than the purchase price of one training helicopter. All we need is a regulatory environment which makes it cost effective to widely offer this kind of training.
SFAR 73 requires an R22 pilot transitioning to R44s to get 5 hours of dual (going from R44 to R22 you have to have 10 hours of dual). Seems reasonable that if you required a minimum of 35 hours in an R44 simulator and then 5 in the actual aircraft you could turn out pilots at least as well trained as we do today, for a lot less money. You might even consider requiring more hours in the simulator (say, 50 hours in the simulator) followed by 5 in the aircraft so that people would actually have more experience under their belts when becoming a rated pilot.
The upsides to this approach is that we could save people a great deal of money, we could increase the safety of training pilots, we could train lots of emergencies (like tail rotor failures) which are typically not trained nor tested for at the private pilot level, and we could graduate people with more aeronautical experience.
Obvious other advantages are a reduction in noise, air pollution, etc. by decreasing the amount of training flight time.
There is also an advantage to having one student observe another student being taught - while this is possible in a 4 seat helicopter like an R44 it's not possible in an R22, so the simulator would provide the same advantage. Additionally, being able to provide a video of the lesson to the student (hey, 4K probably has enough resolution to display the wrap-around video of the simulator at home to the student) so they can look at their mistakes at home (and listen to all the stuff the flight instructor was saying that they blocked out because they were task saturated!
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The one downside I can see is that the way the industry is currently structured, many new pilots get their first 1,000 hours by training student pilots. We can argue whether this is really the best way of training new pilots, but I must admit that I benefitted by this arrangement so I'm a little reluctant to now call for new commercial pilots to lose this avenue for gaining experience.
Ignoring the effect on new CFIs, what do people think? Would we turn out better pilots if we used advanced simulators for primary? What would it take to convince the governing bodies like FAA and EASA to aggressively embrace simulators for primary training?
VTO | Redbird Flight