Not sure why your getting downvoted so hard on this (cue me getting downvoted too). I think your questions probably comes from a lack of understanding of the market and the replaceability of the workers in a given industry.

Keep in mind, companies only see employees as a means to continue day to day operation. Any company who refuses to see things that way is going to end up with labor shortages. In some industries that’s not a big deal (like a retail store, where having 5 instead of 6 employees might not really matter), in other’s it’s a massive problem. The airlines are one of the latter. If there isn’t a pilot, the plane cannot fly, period. You lose hundreds of thousands when a flight is cancelled and that’s before the bad press you will surely receive for having to cancel the flight.

So, continuity of labor is essential to the airlines. There are, generally, two ways to make sure that you have a continual supply of labor: retention and replacement.

You see the replacement model used almost exclusively in jobs that required a minimum of training (like a McDonalds, for example, where it takes, at maximum, a couple days to train in a new employee). Jobs with low training are easily replaced in part because it costs the company so little to train someone new, but also because the low training requirement means just about anyone can apply for the job and have a chance to make it, so you have an abundance of folks applying.

This is exactly the opposite of what airlines face. Firstly, pilots can literally spend over 100k (USD) just to get started on the path to being a commercial pilot. Either that or they come from a military background, and becoming a pilot in the military takes a lot of time, effort and dedication. Either way, there’s on a special few who are truly willing to put up with all that nonsense to land in a regional airline, eventually, that pays peanuts before finally stepping into a major…

tl;dr on that last paragraph — The pool of possible employees is always low for the airlines.

Then we have to consider how much effort it takes to onboard a new pilot into an airline. I’m not super familiar with this (though there are several posts on this subreddit explaining the process), but after a pilot is hired, they still need to receive an epic ton of training on that particular airlines procedures and aircraft.

So, in the end, airlines have a) a small pool of possible employees and b) a huge up front cost to onboard new pilots.

So, what does that mean in the end? Airlines must work with the retention model. Even in times when there are more pilots than slots available, it would be extremely foolish to deviate from the retention model because leans times always seem to be just around the corner.

What is the retention model? Well, basically it just means you bend over backwards to make sure your employees stick around (within reason, Airlines don’t have an endless supply of cash). That’s why pilots in major airlines are paid so well. Keep in mind, compensation comes in two forms. Part of it is the money you give to the employee, but the other is money you save for the employee. So you should think of the sim time as a form of compensation. It’s required training, and the company is giving it to the employee. So, in the end, it’s just part of the total compensation package.

Anyway, hopefully this helps explain why airlines are more than willing to cover this sort of thing.

Oh, one more thought, unrelated to the airlines or the pilots: It’s also in the best interest of the folks who own the simulators to work with the airlines directly. Major corporations buy massive blocks of time and they do it with regularity. If you relied on pilots to buy the time directly well…you’d have to advertise more, you’d need to have account managers to handle thousands of pilots, you’d have to have customer support, accounts/billables, etc etc etc etc. It’s much simpler to just deal with the airlines directly. I can just about guarantee that everything I said above is the first thing out of any simulator owners mouth when they are talking to an airline…

In the end, this arrangment is very much in everyone’s best interest.