The price certainly sounds like a lot when compared to a used 172
which can put you back about $50K or less 8^).
The counter argument is that a simulator can be used to train for certain types of failures, or extreme weather conditions, or a combination of a number of confusing factors, that would be extremely dangerous in real life. (For instance dial in some very turbulent IFR conditions at night, give them some oddball engine reading on the panel to start worrying about, now put them on an approach they aren't completely familiar with, throw in a 737 bearing down on their tail, and then fail their vacuum pump, and if they don't notice the failure, the remainder of the flight could be very short.) That's not the sort of thing you would intentionally go out and do in a real aircraft, but it is these combination of multiple factors that often lead to real problems. So you can load up a person in a sim with problems, adverse conditions, and other distractions, and really train them how to sort it all out and focus on the most important things.
Also you can instantly reposition yourself at the start of an approach, so you might be able to fly/practice 10 approaches in the simulator in the same time it would take to do one complete cycle in a real aircraft. That can be a *huge* savings in your hourly operations cost, or flip it around and you can have 10x more training value for each hour of operation ... for certain tasks at least.
So you certainly wouldn't buy a simulator to replace your real flying experience, but a simulator provides some extremely valuable training capabilities that could be either extremely dangerous or extremely inefficient to do in real life.
Regards,
Curt.
Curtis Olson - University of Minnesota - FlightGear Project
http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/ http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ http://www.flightgear.org
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