Pilots do practice the equivilent of crash landings. A friend of mine is an old 747 pilot for UAL (since retired). And whenever he was given a particularly hard problem to deal with in the flight simulator he would regale us about it over dinner or wine.

Here's an example of the kind of exercise they were given:

Landing at the old Denver Stapleton airport (known for wind shear problems), the wind-shear alarm goes off just before touch-down. The shear is 60mph+ 90 degrees to the runway.

The solution? Bounce the plane on one landing gear back into the air and pancake it onto the parallel runway.

According to the pilot, that probably would total the plane and it definately would fold the undercarriage - which I think counts as a "crash landing" - but the passengers would get to walk/crawl/run away from the flight.

From day one of your first flight the CFI will require the Student Pilot to demonstrate the ability to make an "off field landing" at any and all times during the flight lesson. They love to try and distract the Student and then close the throttle and see how fast the Student reacts with the proper recovery of establishing a safe glide speed while he/she selects a possible clear landing area and adjusts the flight controls for the proper power off trim. When the engines quit for any reason, the airplane becomes a "glider" and must be flown accordingly. While it is true that this kind of training can be performed in a Simulator it must also be demonstrated "real time" on a routine basis to satisfy Company and FAA proficiency requirements. SIM training is fine but is no substitute for actual hands on flying experience.

What about the supposed "class 5" simulators where the sim is supposedly good enough that the pilot could be fully checked out on a plane before flying with passengers? I was offered a job at Singer-Link some 25 years ago and got to go for a "jump seat" ride on a 767 simulator they were testing, and I swear that we barrell rolled the beast, even though I KNOW as an engineer that there were not enough axis of motion to do that..

According to this article Simulator plus aircraft training is MORE effective than just aircraft based training.

Sorry, my renters insurance doesn't and WON'T pay for "practicing" crashed landings. We learned power-on and power-off stalls, spins go-arounds, and and other flight enabling skills. These can all happen while in take-off or landing configuration, and also in straight and level flight. I see the title of this article as somewhat frightening to the common airline-riding folks....think about it....."how do they practice that, and what happens to the aircraft if if it really crash". By some respects, being only a 200-hour pilot makes me quite new, but I have skills that I have to perform bi-annually in a check-ride. We practice our flight-saving manuevers, not our "crash landings".

That's actually a Level D simulator. And yes, You can actually get your entire type rating in this simulator without ever stepping a foot into a real airplane.

Having about 3000 hours of time and been in plenty of simulators, I can tell you that pilots do indeed practice crashes. Devilish sim instructors like to throw scenarios at you where you can barely recover an airplane; we also would practice scenarios where we recreate known crashes and see if we could do any better than the original crew. There's a huge amount of knowledge to be gleaned from seeing how an aircraft reacts in the worst case scenarios; it helps you to avoid getting into a bad place yourself. The high value of the simulator is that it allows you to practice maneuvers that you would never dream of attempting in an actual airplane.