The pilot, however, can be an expert pilot. In fact, I'd argue that there are only a few "expert" crash landers among pilots. There are, however, a lot of very experienced, competent, expert pilots. And they are expert pilots precisely because their experience is not limited to simulators.
Once again, let's look at it from another perspective. Let's say you have a guy who cn do anything in a simulator, but has never flown an ACTUAL plane. Can a person become an expert pilot without ever flying a plane? I would say no. In order to make the leap between a competent trainee an an expert, there's a lot of hours logged in the pilot's seat of an actual plane.
Would that person be competent as a flight instructor? I would say that there might be some limited, specific things he could competently share, but I'd be very uneasy if the pilot of my 747 to Orlando was brand new off the simulator having learned from a guy who had never flown a real plane, who himself learned from a guy who had never flown a real plane.
Sure, you can learn skills in a simulator. I've said this many times in the past, but it's relevant here. There's something called Bloom's taxonomy and it's very simple. People learn things in predictable stages:
Knowledge -> Comprehension -> Application -> Analysis -> Synthesis -> Evaluation
Most martial arts training stops somewhere between comprehension and application. The transition you guys are talking about is exactly the transition between comprehension and application. In adult learning and business training, this is the big challenge. How to get people out of training and able to apply the skills on the job in the quickest, most eficient and reliable way.
But, in business, as in ANY human endeavor, competence is the FIRST step toward expertise. In other words, a person who is an expert must be competent, but not every person who is competent is an expert.
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