How have I missed this? If you’ve followed my other threads, you’ll be sick of being reminded that I am shopping for a kit helicopter. Two companies here at Oshkosh, Safari and CompositeFX, allow show goers to fly their machines with VR using the actual helicoter and the actual controls. The sim is X-Plane and the plane’s models are built by simyourplane with, in some cases, the assistance of VSKYLABS. But you don’t need your own plane. All you need is a stick. By “stick” I mean litterally a peice of straight and strong material. Maybe even an actual stick fallen from the Elm tree in your back yard. The kits are $500 to $800 and can be wired or Bluetooth. He will sell a collective for $100 and a twist throttle for a little more. He’s close friends with Austin. He’s interested in pilots, particilarly airshow and race pilots, as a market. I tried to find @Troll’s simpit as part of an appeal to market to us. It’s an ongoing pitch. Or…
Maybe this is all known already and I somehow missed the thread. I got a close look at the hardware and it’s brilliant. Yet another little corner of Oshkosh that’s blown me away.
Yes. You can quickly velcro each axis, practice, remove and fly. A more obvious application to me is that this makes the perfect home sim using anything that moves as your controller and throttle. Each axis is a spring-wound cable attached to a potentiometer (I guess?). He says that his facebook page has videos explaining the whole thing. The brilliance is that ANYTHING can be made a control this way. The microcontroller side of the setup is partly off the shelf and partly his own design. The connection is USB and/or Bluetooth.
The night before I left Oshkosh I was asked by Lorrie Penner, editor of Sport Aerobatics magazine if I, or any other Pitts pilot, would be available the next day to fly a sequence in a Pitts wired to this system, X-Plane and a VR headset in preparation for an article she was planning. I had to leave early the next day and couldn’t help. I see this is a big deal. The technology has now made training to near perfection something achievable to any pilot without burning a drop of 100LL or Jet-A. The chasm between sim enthusiasts and real pilots is being filled faster than many of us realize. The people at CompositFX put me in a real Mosquito helicopter and let me fly it to my heart’s content around a very nicely done Oshkosh terrain filled with RVs, tents, planes, balloons and spectators. The helicopter used was real but lacked a motor. Next door at Safari, they were letting people fly in VR around the same terrain. But in their case, the helicopter had to go fly each day and the connectors were velcroed so that they could be quickly removed.
It’s been fun to watch. I’ve had to suffer for years joking by my rl pilot friends when I was passionate about simming. They take it seriously now. One of them used X-Plane to prep for a rotor license and he said that it cut his R22 dual time massively.
MUDPIKE is replete with commercial pilots, is it not? A strong testament to the state of current sims. It’s an honor and pleasure to rub elbows with you guys. Makes me feel like much less of a dork.
But I think the big turning point for me was hearing the FP podcast when Wags put Jello in the DCS Hornet and heard his reaction. Now we have Kevin Miller and @Baltic_Dragon collaborating to make a DCS Raven One campaign. I say this with full knowledge that DCS does not a RL fighter pilot make. Still, to hear former jet jockeys enjoy simming gives me a lot of satisfaction.
The real helicopter was blissfully easy for me. That’s due to thousands of hours in decent sims accurately teaching myself the basics. My perceived greatness ended abruptly once I started doing the thing that sims struggle with: autorotations.
I learned the pre- and post-flight flows for the 757/767 a month before making the trip to Denver. That gave me a week ahead of the program to focus on the more complicated parts of my training.
Now I feel I can see a trend that is unstoppable—and is ripe for the taking for talented aviation-minded makers out there. $100k GA flight simulators are about to become passè. The simulating will be done in the hangar in the real plane. Once someone is ready to fly, the velcroed sim hookups are ripped out and off you go!
I think home sims are perfect for every real pilot to train many things (cockpit procedures, emergency procedures, IFR, area of ops familiarisation, … to name few) easy and cheap in a comfort of a home. I use them quite often and quite happily
