Earl I think you may be underestimating the capabilities of today's simulator technology and what they are and are not capable of and how the training process works at both the training vendors such as FlightSafety provide as well as in house training centers run by individual airlines.
I think everyone is misunderstanding my attitude towards training sims. Yes, they are necessary because of procedure practice, route familiarizations, ATC procedures in foreign countries and last but not least, emergencies procedures for in flight emergencies. All I am saying, byw, been through flight safety school several times to meet on going insurance requirements and etc, truly one of the great training facilities in the U.S. I just don't think you can replace that experienced instructor sitting in that right seat, who can give you insights into different situations, which the sim cannot always do.
A good example of what I am talking about is the old 3 holer, Boeing 727! When those things first hit the lines and started flying different routes and landing at different airports, pretty soon they had a couple of over run accidents, one in particular, Salt Lake city in early 70's, demonstrated the problem they were having with air "daming" up under those huge fowler flaps. What with ground effect on a hot day and those big flaps, those thing would float forever, seems like. So the captains at Eastern air lines did some experiments of their own and found that if the first officer, at about 10 feet above the runway, begin to "milk" flaps up 10 to 15 degrees and the thing landed as good as a DC-6B, which btw was the best landing multi-engine hvy which I ever had the pleasure to fly.
See, a flight sim is not going to point those little things out, but to be fair, I think they did include that procedure in future sim flights.
