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PSA: I just logged my 500th hour on the Garmin G5000 sim and it made me question our training focus
Our shop pushes for speed on the actual boxes, which I get, but I hit that sim hour mark last week and realized my fault-finding on weird bus errors is way faster now. The lead tech said I was wasting time on 'video games' instead of real panels. But chasing that phantom voltage drop on a King Air last Thursday, I found it in under an hour because the sim scenario felt familiar. Are we putting too much weight on hands-on only and not enough on structured simulation time?
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anthony4262mo ago
Funny you mention that, my old flight instructor used to call the Redbird sim a "glorified Xbox." Then one day a student came in with a real world vacuum failure story that matched a scenario we'd run the week before. Kid nailed the emergency steps without even thinking, just pure repetition from the sim. Makes you wonder if the old guys are scared of getting shown up by a computer.
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hugo_grant2mo ago
That's a solid point about the sims. Our old foreman had the same "video games" line until I ran the same engine fault drill twenty times in a row. Muscle memory on the real box is one thing, but knowing where to look when the failure isn't in the book is another. Fixed a wonky flap motor on a Citation because I'd seen the same weird power split in the sim. They're not a replacement for hands-on, but they're a good tool we don't use enough.
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