Long day: Flew to SLC yesterday afternoon. Studied til 9:30 p.m. Got up at 2:30 a.m. for more review before my 3:15 a.m. wake up call. Arrived at Flight Safety at 3:50 for my 4 a.m. training slot. Two hour briefing and safety update, then four hours in the sim with a 15 min break. It was a brutal workout. Stuff was failing EVERYWHERE! Controllers tried to vector us into a mountain. Single engine Cat 2 with an airplane on the runway. It was exhausting.
A quick debrief (I passed!) and headed to the airport hoping there was an earlier flight. There wasn't. :-( Watched football for four hours, then a 2.5 hour flight home.
Exhausted and relieved.
I have an interesting question for you, I hope.
I know at your stage of the game, you likely exit these sim sessions absolutely knowing you gained skills that might save your butt in the real world.
It may be too soon to ask you this but maybe one of the other long-timers can answer.
Do you feel if you were taking this same sim ride 20 years from now that you could form a bad habit of thinking that the only place where anything tries to kill you is in the electronic box?
Or does the stuff in the box happen often enough in the real world that you're more feeling like it's prep for reality than "oh they're going to try to kill us again in this thing"?
Just a weird thought I've had for years as the accidents in pro flying seem to slide ever more toward pilots simply not believing what they're seeing right in front of them in the real aircraft.
Contrarily when aircraft were LESS reliable and tried to kill people on a regular basis, we didn't have the boxes back then, and some crews died for lack of knowing what was happening.
But I think we are in a strange time of very high reliability in the overall system and it leaves even pro crews that have spent tons of time in the box, disconnected and not figuring it out, when something happens in the real world.
To some extent you can chalk this reasoning up to Roselawn, the NY icing thing, the Air France one, and even perhaps the Wee Too Low and Ho Lee Fuk guys in SFO. Certainly there were other factors.
But do you trust the airplane more and the box far far less? And could it affect how you respond in the airplane?
Sorry to sound morbid. I just find the whole concept of spending a number of hours in a box learning what will kill you as a fascinating training method when somewhere deep down, the humans know they are in a box.
I also know it's realistic enough that folks have said they truly feared for their lives early on. But I wonder how much that dulls over a career.