Hi there,I spend 99% of my sim time flying heavy jets - nothing smaller than a Boeing 737/Airbus A318, and usually the larger 747/767/777 etc... Almost all flight control hardware I look at seems to be aimed at GA/General Aviation flying... Can anyone recommend good hardware that would be great for controlling these big birds? One thing I'd like to be able to do (wierdly) is have independent engine thrust control so as to make tight turns easier when taxiing, so preferably a set with 4 thust levers would be good.However as I'm currently using a (very) old Microsoft Force Feedback 2 joystick, anything would be better!!Many thanks for your advice.

Saitek's range of stuff is well worth a look in terms of price. Of course your joystick is fine for flying every Airbus apart from the original A300, which has a normal yoke. I have the Saitek Rudder pedals and they are both sturdy and responsive, with quite a wide range of tension adjustment available. Being quite large, they do need a lot of space under your desk, but it does mean they don't tend to move around on the floor very much. They have toe brakes too, which would also be useful for differential braking to get your big &@($* A340 around the taxiways!Like most throttle add-ons, Saitek's throttle system will allow you to daisy-chain multiple ones together to create multi-engine set ups and they are pretty good for the money. I don't have their yoke, and I believe some people are not keen on the centre detent it has, so you might want to see if you can get your hands on one in a computer hardware shop before handing over cash.If you are a DIY type, I can also recommend the BU0836, which is an excellent little circuit board you can buy that makes creating your own controllers a fairly simple affair. You can find that thing here: http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/joystick/At 17 quid (34-ish Dollars), it's definitely one of the cheapest ways to get some external hardware for FS, and service is good too, I got my BU0836 two days after I placed the order online. It is easy to connect up to a computer and to various switches and rotary controllers. It simply goes into a USB port on your computer where it is detected just like a regular joystick on your system. It would also let you create radio stacks and toggle switches for other things too incidentally.You can find a good many online tutorials on how to make throttles, rudders and yokes which use such circuitry. For example, I made two aircraft yokes for the cockpit I'm building out of copper tubing (which can be a bit tricky and required me to buy a pipe bending spring for a tenner) but they are a good emulation of the aluminium yokes usually found in most big airliners. Although it is worth noting that cockpit projects of that type are invariably very long-term projects, so you might want to go with something simpler if you don't want to be waiting a long time to enjoy things. Building a dirty great big two seat airliner cockpit in a spare room of your house is about about as welcome as a kick in the face as far as my wife is concerned!Al

CH Products has a nice throttle assembly too that you can pick up cheap on e-bay. You get 6 levers and a bag with both blue / red / black knobs depending on the setup. It also has several toggle switches along the front.I use that in combination with thier Yoke and Pedals for my flying and it works great. I labeled it all and with FSUIPC I have it configured to work with Turbo-Prop, 2-engine, and 4-engine setups. Very nice. I then programed the three levers on the yoke to use only for GA flying if I ever do that.I think the CH throttle assembly costs about the same as one of the three lever Saitek assemblies.