Originally Posted by
Paul Cantrell
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.
Alright, I'm an avid simmer (DCS) because I get to shoot things from a heli that is expensive to do and slightly illegal in the real thing. Too old for the military now.
Even with all the advances and the great breakthroughs in VR, the gap between reality and sim is still too great.
The greatest issue is standardisation.
$20k will literally put you in an f-16 cockpit with full working switches, MFDs, and triple projectors throwing an immersive view at your front 180 degrees.
https://viperwing.com/f-16-flight-simulator/
But do you assume these guys have their software set up properly?
Every new patch changes the flight profiles in DCS, touted to be one of the most accurate civilian sim products out there.
Who will inspect them?
If a Robbie doesn't meet standards you can end up dead, but who will there be to measure actual cyclic and collective response and travel on every sim?
I can walk from one robbie to the next at an airport, and aside from slight differences in engine power or control "stickiness" I can expect no change in their flight characteristics that would be discernible to someone at my level.
There are several Robbie sim models on as many flight sim platforms and they all behave differently. To get to your expected costs for the sim, many of these products would be implemented in switched "sim pits".
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.
I got excited recently when MP studios announced they'd be releasing a Cabri G2 sim model, I was excited for a chance to practise exactly what you say would be a good thing - emergency procedures.
But they delivered it on P3D and FSX, both notoriously bad at delivering helicopter flight modelling.
The review of it looks positively rubbish. Pull up on the collective and you fly, right (power) pedal action doesn't even seem properly modelled.
If they can't model normal flight characteristics properly, there's no hope of modelling the response of a seized tail rotor gearbox.
I agree that being an invested flight simmer
will reduce the time taken to familiarise with a helicopter and reduce the time to hover, but it requires a lot of time and money to get there.
For instance, how do you teach someone the use of the pedals properly when they have developed about 200 hours worth of muscle memory on a joystick twist pedal, never using their feet.
I'd even be prepared to claim that a simmer might be better suited to pilot UAVs from remote stations than fully qualified pilots. Perhaps a future for sims lies there.
Most of the developers are not pilots themselves, basing flight models off graphs and performance charts.
This is the expertise and skills that will be carried to the market were the FAA to endorse sims, and it's not good.
Accurate sims that would be suited to the task you recommend already exist and they are not cheap. This is unlikely to change soon.