What If Your Aircraft Simulator Is Wrong?

Aircraft Simulators are just that, they are devices which can simulate aircraft in flight. It's very wise to use these tools, as long as they are calibrated and programmed correctly, but what happens when they aren't? A simulation is not a real life event, by definition. Thus, we have a problem don't we - painstaking testing and complex programming. In the future we will have some competition with self-programmable artificial intelligence (AI). Let's talk.

In the future AI Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will learn, record, correct, and pass on that information to all other UAVs of that type. This will provide very accurate simulation devices to test the performance of certain maneuvers, best of all, you may not need simulators at all at that point, as you can rely on the UAV to correct without crashing even operating at the very edge of the envelope.

There is an interesting paper worthy of note, I'd like to use as exhibit A of my discussion here today, the research paper is: "Handling Qualities and Pilot Evaluation - 1984 Wright Brothers Lectureship in Aeronautics," by Robert P. Harper Jr. and George E. Cooper. In conclusion the researchers note amongst other things:

1. The increasing use of flight simulation, both groundbased and airborne, has enabled great strides to be made in understanding the nature of the pilot-vehicle dynamic system, and substantial quantities of handling qualities data has been generated.
2. Flight simulation is bringing increased opportunities as well as challenges for the test pilot to affect the design of modern aircraft.
3. For simulation results to be accurate and informative, the experiments must be meticulously planned and executed through.

Right, and thus, we really need test pilots, and we really need to spend extra time documenting everything they do, as it all matters, especially with high-performance aircraft. Every single little movement of the controls, and all of the outside weather conditions are paramount. That's a lot of data, often not so easily recorded for software databases which run our aircraft simulators.

It is quite possible for a pilot in a simulator to try something during an extremely challenging incident to save or recover the aircraft that the simulator has never been programmed for, thus, we have no real concept of what the final outcome would be - well, we have an idea, but who says it's accurate at that point, no one has ever done that with an aircraft of that type in the real world, the place where real pilots, (future unmanned systems), and real aircraft will fly, or not? Please consider all this and think on it.