Thanks for that, Shane. Never knew why they were named that.
So I got the pilot thing sorted. Autodesk has a subscription site that allows you to specify some character traits and create an FBX file complete with skin and clothes, easily-manipulated bones, textures, alphas, and all sorts of other stuff that you could want. Male, female, orcish types, ogres, panther-women, etc . . . I'm using one that I received looking like
THIS and within about 15 minutes I had it looking like
THIS.
Perfect for fitting into aircraft and in pretty much anything else you want posable, unique people in an environment. They come in FBX format, and can convert into Max (not sure which versions at the moment) with a script, although I chose not to use it. All in all there's quite a bit of stuff, but you can just trim it all away and then leave what you want in the model. The lowest LOD consists of about 26k polys with a 2048 map, so it's a bit hefty for a sim but it's a great place to start.
Autodesk Character Creator