Men's Journal

Pilots don’t practice landing in the Hudson River, but they do all face several lifetimes’ worth of nightmare scenarios inside increasingly sophisticated simulators.

By Stephen Budiansky

Just minutes after he set his crippled Airbus A320 down on the Hudson River in a flawlessly executed emergency landing in January, US Airways captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III was sitting in the waiting room of the New York Waterway ferry terminal on Pier 79, looking as if nothing special had happened. New York’s deputy secretary for public safety spotted the hero of the hour, made his way across the room, pumped Sully’s hand, and congratulated him on a brilliant job of flying that saved the lives of everyone aboard. “That’s what we’re trained to do,” Sullenberger shrugged in reply.

That wasn’t just aw-shucks modesty. Like every commercial airline captain, Sullenberger has spent the better part of two full days every six months at the controls of a behemoth, $10 million flight simulator while several lifetimes’ worth of midair disasters break loose around him. Engines catch on fire. Visibility drops to zero. Hydraulic systems fail, with no way out but a 200-mph landing without flaps. Engines die in the middle of a tricky climb-out through the Andes Mountains. Trucks wander onto the runway, forcing a last-second aborted touchdown and full-throttle escape. Wind shears rip through at the moment of takeoff, suddenly robbing the plane of air speed with a stomach-wrenching plunge.

Pilots call the simulator “the box.” It’s not a term of endearment. “No matter how macho or even how skilled a pilot is,” says airline pilot Patrick Smith, “there’s no fun about getting in the box and being put through the wringer.”

Smith recalls the time a pilot friend of his, a new hire for a regional airline, called him up after his first experience dodging one emergency after another in the cockpit of a simulator. “Why didn’t you warn me,” his friend moaned, “just how indescribably, gut-churningly awful” it would be?

Simulators are so effective at re-creating reality these days that the FAA permits an experienced pilot who is transitioning to a new type of aircraft to complete all of his training on the ground to qualify. So the first time he takes his turn at the controls of the actual airplane will be on a passenger-hauling run. Simulators are routinely used to re-create accidents to help figure out what went wrong and to develop procedures that can avert a rerun.

The first simulators, back in the 1930s, looked like kiddie cars. The Link Trainer, which spun around and banked with the help of air bellows originally designed for nickelodeons and self-playing pipe organs, taught airmen in World War II the basics of how to use controls and instruments before they first set foot in real airplanes. The latest full-flight trainers, called Level D, cost as much as Learjets. And the things are huge, basically boxes the size of a modest living room on stilts. It takes a 747 freighter to deliver one.

Inside is an actual cockpit, down to every lamp and button and switch, supplied by the aircraft’s manufacturer. The trainer is encased in a pod that rides on six spiderlike hydraulic or electric-actuator-driven legs that can impart 30,000 pounds of thrust in any direction. The cabin can roll, pitch, and yaw up to 35 degrees; it can also surge (accelerate forward or back), sway side to side, or heave up and down with five feet of motion. The seat belts aren’t there for show.

A clever blend of physics and human psychology lies at the heart of a modern simulator’s ability to fool the mind into believing it’s the real thing. Some things a simulator can’t do can be faked, thanks to research on how the body’s sense organs detect motion and relay the signal to the brain. For instance: The legs that the simulator pod rides on extend only so far before they run to the end of their range of motion. But experiments showed that it’s the initial acceleration at the start of a maneuver that conveys to the body’s senses the crucial cues; that job done, the legs can slowly creep back to their neutral position, under the human sensory threshold, to be ready for the next maneuver. They’re constantly doing that throughout a simulated flight, and the crew inside never notices.

Everyone thinks that graphics must be the thing that really makes a difference between playing with a simulator on your desktop computer and flying one of the airline’s multimillion-dollar trainers. In fact, although the visual cues — such as approach lights — that the pilots rely on for landing are very realistic, other imagery borders on hokey: boxy buildings, pointy trees.

The visual cues are there to reinforce the sense of motion, to make body and mind believe what the inner ear sensors and the pit of the stomach are also saying. When, in some test versions, the pictures and the motions have gotten slightly out of sync, even the most experienced fliers have found themselves lunging for the barf bags.

Advanced simulators rely on cartloads of real-life data to reproduce the behavior of the airplane’s instruments, controls, and aerodynamics under all sorts of atmospheric and flight conditions. The main thing, pilots say, is that the whole thing  feels like a 50- or 100-ton aircraft — that there’s a palpable sense of inertia. Taxiing along the runway, you feel the bumps as you pass over concrete expansion joints. Hit the brakes hard, and you’ll feel it. Push the throttle forward, and there’s a delay as the turbines spool up. At high airspeeds the yoke, or control column, becomes more sensitive, just as in actual flight. And lose a hydraulic system, and the force it takes to push the rudder pedals or yoke can become like a wrestling match. Because of the limitations of what you can risk in a real plane, simulators can be more realistic than the actual thing. In an airplane, an instructor can fake an engine loss at takeoff by pulling the throttle back, for example, but, as Smith says, it’s always a “half-assed” version. Bill Johansen, a retired Airbus captain, remembers the time he was flying a 727 that lost an engine: He and his first officer swung into the routine they had rehearsed over and over again, a complex sequence of procedures to shut down the engine and compensate for the shift in thrust. The ridiculous thought that went through his head when they were done was: Wow, that was just like in the simulator.

A lot of the emergency drills that pilots train for in the simulator have nothing to do with developing seat-of-the-pants reactions, but with being able to remember the right sequence of technical procedures or to pull out the right checklists. In fact, training to handle an emergency is mostly about engineering the seat-of-the-pants part out of the equation altogether. Airplanes these days are complex systems, and methodical procedure is what almost always carries the day over any Hollywood-style heroic struggles with the stick. “By the time you’re at an airline, your seat-of-the-pants skills are more or less as refined as they’re going to be,” says Smith, a 767 first officer who has been flying commercial aircraft for 19 years and also writes the “Ask the Pilot” column for Salon.com. “You already know how to fly an airplane. What you’re doing is building above and beyond that with knowledge and procedures.”

No one will ever question Captain Sully’s seat-of-the-pants credentials. In fact, what he did in the Hudson River isn’t part of any drill. That’s mostly because ditching with no engine power is such an extremely unlikely event that it’s just not worth practicing; it’s also because the actual ditching part is easier than handling the emergency that led up to it. Although the situation the crew of Flight 1549 faced was “everyone’s worst nightmare — low altitude, an urban environment, little time,” says another instructor, “I like to think most pilots could have done the same thing from their training.” Other instructors agree that as superbly as Captain Sully performed, there was in fairness a certain amount of dumb luck that no one could prepare for. Had Flight 1549 hit the birds that took out both engines at, say, 1,000 feet instead of 3,200 feet, that plane would have been heading for a distinctly unsmooth landing smack in the middle of one of the most densely populated environments in the world.

Sometimes when there are a few minutes left at the end of the FAA-required syllabus, an instructor will let the crew do whatever it wants on the simulator. And in those moments, yes, pilots do sometimes act like the rest of us. There are stories of flying a jumbo jet under the Verrazano-Narrows bridge at 400 mph, doing aileron rolls in a 777, and other wiseguy stunts. Says Johansen, “You can bet that everyone with access to an A320 simulator has now tried losing two engines at 3,200 feet.”

Stephen Budiansky is the author of Air Power, among other books about military history and science.