On July 22, 1999, I picked up my good friend James Price at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. James had taken time away from his wife and busy schedule, and traveled here from California to help program some of the more difficult tasks in our simulator. Ironically, James flew in on a Delta Airlines Boeing 757. So he was well prepared to critique us on what we had accomplished thus far. All kidding aside, I consider James, a real world Air Traffic Controller, the "King" of cockpit building. His self taught programming skills are truly incredible. He has forgotten more in this area than I will ever know. And a true gentlemen he is. During his visit, my brother Dave was still hospitalized. It was important to James that we take some time and visit Dave at the hospital. This gesture meant quite a bit to both Dave and I, and especially my parents. I will be flying out to California in September to see James's amazing 737 cockpit.

We accomplished quite a bit in the 2 1/2 days James was here. In all, I think we only slept in the neighborhood of 5 hours as we worked well into the early morning hours both nights. On Thursday evening, we were visited by another friend of mine, Roy Stefanussen. Roy is a DC-8 Captain for DHL Worldwide Express here in Cincinnati. After having flown for years in the real thing, I guess I was anticipating Roy to be somewhat bored by our projects. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Roy was extremely impressed and spent several hours with us. James and Roy actually became pretty good partners. As James was programming the throttles, speed brake, flaps and reversers, Roy was inside the cockpit relaying feedback on how the equipment was handling. They spent quite a bit of time at this until both were satisfied that it was performing as realistic as possible. Oh yea, what was I doing? I was making the beer and pizza runs as requested!

I would like to share with you some of the things we accomplished. For anyone considering building their own simulator, hopefully this will give you some ideas as to what can be done. First and foremost, the most important piece of equipment in the equation is the EPIC CARD created and manufactured by Ralph Robinson of R&R Electronics. This is truly the "brains" of the system. I have explained elsewhere on this site the basics of the card. Here I would rather focus on the advanced capabilities of this truly magnificent piece of work. In addition to the basic EPIC which we already had, at James request, I ordered the 32 point output module which interfaces with the EPIC. This addon card controls lights in the cockpit.

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