The Analog Bug Flight Simulator: Rehearsing Catastrophic Failures With Paper Cockpits

In aviation, no pilot is allowed near a real cockpit without extensive hours in flight simulators, rehearsing everything from engine fires to total instrument failure. In software, by contrast, many teams meet their first true catastrophe live in production, with customers watching.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

This post explores the idea of the “analog bug flight simulator”—paper-based, low-risk simulations of major failures that let teams practice incident response long before real disasters hit. By combining paper cockpits, SRE principles, checklists, and tabletop exercises, you can turn chaos into a rehearsed performance rather than an improvised panic.

Why You Need to Rehearse Disasters Before They’re Real

Modern systems are:

Always-on and globally distributed
Composed of many independent, interacting services
Interwoven with compliance, privacy, and regulatory constraints

When something goes deeply wrong, you’re not just dealing with a bug. You’re dealing with:

Customer impact and reputational risk
Compliance obligations and legal exposure
Cross-team communication breakdowns
High cognitive load and emotional stress

Expecting your team to figure all of this out for the first time under fire is unrealistic. Just as pilots train for catastrophic scenarios in simulators, software organizations should rehearse catastrophic failures in low-risk environments before they occur in production.

That’s where analog flight simulators come in.

What Is an Analog Bug Flight Simulator?

An analog bug flight simulator is a paper-based, low-tech rehearsal of a major incident. Instead of running chaos experiments in live or staging environments, you:

Sketch out the system on paper (your “cockpit”)
Describe a failure scenario that unfolds over time
Walk through who does what, when, and how
Use checklists, runbooks, and incident playbooks as if it were real
Capture decisions, missteps, and gaps as you go

It’s essentially a tabletop exercise with a strong emphasis on:

System behavior
Human decision-making
Process and communication

Because it’s analog, you can:

Safely explore extreme or unlikely failure modes
Pause, rewind, and branch into “what if” paths
Involve people who don’t have access to all systems yet
Focus on thinking rather than clicking

You’re not testing your infrastructure; you’re testing your organization’s ability to respond.

The Role of Incident Response Plans and Procedures

An analog simulation is only as good as the procedures it exercises. That’s why well-defined incident response plans are essential.

A robust incident response plan should include:

Clear roles and responsibilities
- Incident commander (IC)
- Communications lead
- Technical leads (by system or domain)
- Scribe / incident documentarian
Severity levels and triggers
What makes this a SEV-1 vs. SEV-2? Who can declare or downgrade severity?
Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
Step-by-step guides for common classes of incidents: outages, data leaks, ransomware, etc.
Communication playbooks
- Internal (Slack/Teams, email, incident channels)
- External (status page, customer updates, regulators if needed)
Compliance and legal pathways
For example: data breaches may require notification within a legally defined window.

Your paper cockpit sessions should exercise these procedures:

Do people know the plan exists and where to find it?
Can someone new to the team follow the checklist?
Do handoffs and decisions feel clear, or chaotic and ad hoc?

Analog simulations expose where your written processes fail to match reality—which is where incidents go sideways.

From Pen Tests to Paper Cockpits: Simulating Realistic Attacks

Most mature organizations already use:

Penetration tests to discover vulnerabilities
Tabletop exercises to walk through security incidents

These are foundational, but often they:

Focus narrowly on the security angle
Assume ideal communication and fast decisions
Don’t model broader reliability or business impact

By layering in analog flight simulators that combine security and reliability:

Pen test findings can become scenario seeds (e.g., “Assume this vuln was exploited at 3 a.m.”)
Tabletop exercises can be structured like real-time SRE-style incident drills
You connect technical failures, human factors, and business consequences in one coherent rehearsal

Your goal is to validate not just that controls exist, but that:

People, processes, and systems work together under stress.

SRE Principles as the Framework for Disaster Drills

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles provide a natural framework for designing and running these simulations.

Key SRE concepts to incorporate:

Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
Make impact concrete. During the drill, track:
- What SLOs are being violated?
- How long can we remain out of compliance?
Error Budgets
Tie the scenario to real trade-offs:
- “We’ve burned 80% of this quarter’s error budget; what decisions change?”
Incident Lifecycle
Practice the complete flow:
- Detection → Triage → Mitigation → Recovery → Postmortem
Blameless Postmortems
Every analog drill should end with a blameless review that asks:
- What made this hard?
- Where did tooling, process, or org structure get in the way?
- What will we change next?

SRE gives you the language and structure to ensure your simulations improve resilience, rather than just dramatize chaos.

Checklists and Procedural Discipline: Lessons From Aviation

Aviation’s safety record is built on checklists and procedural discipline. Nobody trusts memory at 30,000 feet.

You can borrow the same approach:

Example Checklists for Analog Drills

Incident Initialization Checklist
- Confirm incident commander
- Declare severity level
- Create incident channel and log document
- Identify affected services and SLOs
- Notify on-call roles and relevant stakeholders
Containment & Mitigation Checklist
- Stop further damage (e.g., block IPs, disable compromised accounts)
- Put the system in the safest possible degraded state
- Capture key forensic data before changing state where possible
- Document all changes and timestamps
Communication Checklist
- Internal summary every X minutes in the incident channel
- External status page updates on a defined cadence
- Escalation to leadership / legal / PR as thresholds are met

During paper simulations, enforce these checklists as if the incident were real. Over time, this builds:

Habit formation under low pressure
Consistency across different teams and time zones
Reduced cognitive load during actual emergencies

The goal is not to turn people into robots; it’s to free their mental capacity for novel problem-solving, not basics they could have followed from a list.

Designing Your First Paper Cockpit Exercise

You don’t need a big budget or fancy tools to start. A practical first exercise might look like this:

Pick a specific, plausible catastrophic scenario
- Example: “Primary database cluster suffers correlated failures during a schema migration; failover is slower than expected; data consistency is unclear.”
Assemble a cross-functional group
- On-call engineer(s)
- SRE/operations
- Security (if relevant)
- Product / customer success
- Someone to play the role of customers or external stakeholders
Create your paper cockpit
- Draw the main services, data stores, and external dependencies on a whiteboard or large sheet of paper.
- Mark monitoring/observability tools and communication channels.
Script the incident timeline
- T+0: Alert triggered
- T+5: More alerts, customers begin reporting problems
- T+20: A secondary system starts failing
- T+45: Evidence suggests possible data loss
- Continue to unfold new clues and complications
Run the simulation
- One facilitator reveals new events over simulated time.
- The team explains what they would do, referencing docs, dashboards, and runbooks.
- A scribe records actions, questions, and blockers.
Debrief using an SRE-style postmortem
- What worked well?
- Where did procedures fail or not exist?
- What documentation or tools were missing?
- What concrete improvements will you make?

Repeat these exercises regularly, changing scenarios and rotating roles so that resilience is organizational, not just dependent on a few experts.

Why This Matters in Always-On Production Environments

In an always-on world, downtime and data incidents are not just technical glitches; they’re business events with financial, legal, and reputational consequences.

Relying solely on:

Robust architectures
Monitoring and alerting
Penetration testing and red teams

…is necessary but not sufficient.

You must also ensure that:

People know their roles under pressure
Processes are tested in realistic conditions
Communication paths are rehearsed and reliable
Compliance obligations are understood and actionable

Proactive rehearsal of disasters—especially through low-risk analog simulations—turns unknowns into known challenges. When a real catastrophe strikes, your team isn’t improvising a response; they’re executing a practiced playbook and adapting from a position of familiarity rather than panic.

Conclusion: Build Your Own Flight School for Failure

If you wouldn’t board a plane whose pilot had never trained in a simulator, why trust a critical, always-on system that’s never rehearsed a true disaster?

Analog bug flight simulators—paper cockpits, checklists, and structured tabletop exercises—offer a powerful, low-risk way to:

Validate your incident response plans
Stress-test your organization’s decision-making
Integrate SRE principles into everyday practice
Strengthen both security and reliability postures

You don’t need perfect tooling to start. All you need is:

A whiteboard
A few printed checklists and playbooks
A realistic scenario
A commitment to honest, blameless learning

Start small. Run one simulation. Capture what you learn. Then iterate.

Over time, you’ll build not just more resilient systems—but a more resilient organization, one that’s ready for catastrophic failures before they ever hit production.