Attending recurrent, our instructor had placed their portable smoke machine in the sim.
Generally they allow it to puff a couple times then shut it off as we run through the emer descent scenario, nothing new.
This time however, the machine stuck in the full "on" position and within a couple minutes filled the sim so full, I couldn't see my hand in front of my goggles.
We were 0/0, couldn't see the PFD's, MFD, radios.. nothing. We had selected mask and inter-phone from the mem items, but everything to follow was futile at best.
With 25 years of flying professionally, I sat there trying my best to feel around my cockpit in the midst of an emergency descent and couldn't help but think of this crew and what they had to be experiencing. Add to it the heat, stress and frustration of comm relays, etc.
Sim instructor couldn't see anything, we had to shut down and evac the sim.
Ended up setting the smoke alarms off in the sim bay and evacuating the entire building, class rooms and all.
It was an eye opening experience I'll never forget as I sat there doing everything I feasibly could to control my bird.
So, as it has been stated here many times, we must learn from this crew who were in an impossible situation.
Smoke in the cockpit or any sign of an onboard fire, find some pavement "now".
And may we never have to deal with this tragic event.
RIP brothers.