Article Type: Feature
Article Date: November 27, 2001
I'm sure that there are quite a few of you out there wondering whatever would cause a fully grown adult to act like a total child and spend money like it grows on trees.
I'm going to not only try to explain it, I'm going to do my best to drag your unsuspecting buns along for the ride. :)
I know for sure that there isn't a one of you here that didn't have a Walter Mitty moment. How many of you can honestly say that you've never fantasized about being a Sierra Hotel jet pilot with his hair on fire, blasting enemy aircraft from the sky with impunity? What about being a master of tank tactics, attacking the evil hun with everything you've got? Come on, admit it. You've done this at least once.
Building your own cockpit enhances that fantasy. It allows you to literally strap on that airplane and go flying, or tanking, or mech-driving. It doesn't really matter WHAT you're simulating.
Having that shell around you does one thing to near prefection. It suspends your disbelief in your surrounding environment. You might think that it's silly, but trust me it works.
Here's an example I give nearly everyone that asks me why I do what I do:
In 1996 I worked part time for a company called Simulator Training, Inc., in Seattle. I did hardware and software maintenance on the simulators and Cockpit Procedures Trainers they had. My favorite sim was the Conductron-Missouri Boeing 737-200 flight simulator. It was manufactured around 1967. This wheezy old girl was absolutely amazing. The flight deck was on a limited travel motion base. It only did a small amount of pitch and roll.
As part of my training, I needed to know how to prep the simulator for flight crews. This consisted of getting the scene graphs loaded for the area the crew will be flying in as well as navaid data, etc. I then had to go through the published startup for the 737 if they were not going to be working on that for the day. This was kind of neat because you got to hear the APU crank up and run and then you spooled up the engines and set up the various "start-up" things. It's been too many years for me to accurately recall it all. :)
One of the things I used to do was practice that start-up procedure again and again so I didn't have to keep asking my boss what the next step was. Since I worked the late shift, we didn't have a lot of students coming in. This gave me a lot of time to play . The thing is when you're "flying" this simulator, it takes all of about 30 seconds to forget you're 10 feet off the foor in a building. Even with the motion base disabled, the sound, smell and feel literally takes you there. I'd fly that 737 around the pattern doing touch-n-gos for a half hour or more, and every time I got out of that thing, my hands were shaking and I was sweating like a pig. Grinning like a fool.
THAT is what we're all after. Even if that simulator had a graphics generator that could only do 320x240 in a few colors, it was real. There's nothing more satisfying than climbing into your own simulator, only to exit hours later, totally exhausted and feeling like a million bucks.
What's really cool is there are companies out there realizing that our kind of flight simulation isn't just a big boy's game anymore. There are companies like Project Magenta creating custom software packages explicitly for the hobby cockpit builder. GoFlight is building a very flexible line of flight simulation hardware that is made to sit on your desk. Companies are starting to listen to us for once! We're not freaks, we're not! *laughs*
I'm going to take you on a brief tour of the projects that folks are working on.
First off, we've got the From Scratch gang. These guys are building their dream machines from scratch. They do all or most of the design work themselves.
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This is an F-16 cockpit being built by Jose Pedro Ferreira of Portugal.  |
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| Here is a nice looking F-16 being built by Michael Hirczy from Austria. |
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| From Australia, Rod Dale is building a VERY nice F-111. It looks real, but it's 99% built from scratch. |
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| Also from Australia, Albert Yung has built a fold up F-16! |
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| Albert is a furniture design student, and it shows. He's done a very good job with this. Puts a whole new twist on 'portable,' doesn't it? |
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| This is a P-51D cockpit built by Bob Davis. This is unique in that the canopy is from a real fighter. Bob figures it's from either a P-80 or some Century Series jet. |
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| This is another fine example of an F-16 cockpit. This was built by Francisco Picornell. |
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| This F-16 cockpit was built by Marv Debeque. If this is the picture I think it is, it was taken as part of an ad campaign for Honeywell. Marv works for Honeywell and they manufacture the cockpit lamp he's holding in his hand. When it was discovered that Marv had a F-16 cockpit handy, he volunteered for the photo shoot. I'm pretty sure all the gear he's wearing is his too. :) |
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| Here's another nice F-16 done by Craig Wylie from Malasia. |
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| This cockpit is being built by Roy Coates of the UK. He's builing a generic cockpit that's just supposed to look cool. From what I can tell he's done a good job. |
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| This is another F-16 type built by Oliver Eichhor of New York City. |
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| The Simpits webmaster, Prohm 'Rama' Snitwong from Thailand is building a nice F-16 cockpit. |
Now we have the Real Life Conversions. These are the guys on the bleeding edge of this hobby. They take real aircraft, cut 'em up and make flight simulators out of them. The range goes from a Boeing 747-100 (no lie!) to my McDonnell-Douglas F-15C. We're also considered to be the most unusual of the bunch. I've been accused of having my common sense be run through a cheese grater. I'd be annoyed if I wasn't fairly sure they were correct in that accusation. :)
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| Here is Justin Messenger's DC-8. This is a former drug-runner until it was captured in the 80's after landing in Waco, TX from Mexico with a huge load of drugs. Justin saved the cockpit section from the scrapper's blade. |
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| Here's the 747-100 I mentioned. It's been greatly trimmed down from what it once was, but after owner Steve Smith is done with it, you'll see a gleaming 747-400 in that slightly crisped 747 flight deck shell. |
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| Darren Beaumont from the UK is working on this great Embraer Bandierante. He's converting it into a generic cockpit based around the Embraer 145 and 135. |
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| Dave Rowbotham of San Diego, CA is converting this Beechcraft Bonanza cockpit into a single seat King Air c90/200. |
