Hm I need to get out there more. Didn't know that Travolta flew out here...

 

I'm sure they love that shade when it gets to 110+ between July-September.

 

I bet they do!

 

...and I lied. The dates were off.

 

08.Dec.09:

 

08.Mar.10:

It was a B-17 Januaryish, and John Travolta's 707 around April. Harbor gets some interesting corp traffic too, doesn't it? Under Swift's giant almost-hangar-sun-blocker?

 

I got very similar pics of those same aircraft taken from the restaurant rooftop. I lived 2nm center line of 7R and rented from Westwind.

I'm curious if Airbus would even agree to assist a hobby simulation company.. My guess is they would not.

 

I'm pretty sure Airbus has / had a partnership with Revell of Germany, which is a company that produces plastic model kits. Over at the Aerosoft forums Mathijs Kok of Aerosoft also mentioned something about getting drawings from Airbus for their AirbusX project. Probably money changed hands at some points in both cases, but it would seem Airbus is not opposed in principle to working with hobby companies. Also the whole A <380 - love at first flight marketing campaign is aimed at possible passengers rather than airline executives directly, so I'm sure they could justify working with a hobbyist fan-base from a business point of view too.

 

Not to make assumptions on the development process or anything, but I'd go out on a limb to say that the development of a high accuracy sim relies mostly on having a partner airline to work with them, as any maintenance engineer is as good as if not better than an official airbus document. And they'd be more willing to help if it was considered a hobby for them too, where as airbus employee's I'd say would consider it more related to work. Then, a small team of pilots to test the flight model would be needed, but there's enough on the forum to cover that base. With the airlines supplying FCOMs, FCTMs, Copies of Tech Logs, Maintance Manuals ect, I'd say the actual connection in Airbus Industries is fairly unimportant, nice to have, but unimportant.....

 

Capt. Rónán O Cadhain.

 

I partially disagree. For systems and procedure modelling you can get pretty far with data from an airline, especially if they give you access to the FC-manuals and the tech manuals. To make an accurate flight model however you're going to need a bunch of data that an airline won't have (because it would be pretty useless to them unless they want to develop their own sims in-house). Sure you could try to reverse engineer based on publicly available data and if you're an expert at flight dynamics you could probably get there with a lot of pilot input and tweaking, but geting a data-set from the manufacturer would be a lot easier. Performance tables and the like tell you the numbers you should be getting out of your flight model at the end, but not how to set up your flight model.

 

As an example consider the pitch rate: this is determined by (IIRC, flight dynamics was a couple of years ago): the change of aerodynamic moment of the main wing due to change of angle of attack, the change of aerodynamic moment of the horizontal stabiliser due to change of angle of attack (of the horizontal stabiliser) and the change in aerodynamic moment due to deflection of the elevator.

Now imagine one of your test pilots tells you 'when I pitch up the rotation feels a bit slow', which of those numbers should you change? And by how much? When you've tweaked those numbers so you're happy with them the next question is, for which range of speeds, configurations and flight conditions are those numbers valid?

An aircraft manufacturer will already have a complete dataset that can answer all those questions. It's not impossible to do yourself (especially if you're willing to settle for 'we fudged it a bit and now it's close enough'), but a partnership will make things a lot easier.

 

Last small side-note, I'm sure most Airbus employees are just as passionate about aviation as most airline employees. The chances of an Airbus employee considering helping an add-on developer as a hobby rather than work are about the same as for an airline employee.

I got very similar pics of those same aircraft taken from the restaurant rooftop. I lived 2nm center line of 7R and rented from Westwind.

 

Awesome. I lived in the apartments right across (the) I-17 from John C Lincoln Hospital, and worked at the other FBO at DVT (which is how I got a ton of pictures of the B-17, since we serviced it for those few days).

 

Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera up there more often because my boss had the (incorrect) idea that it was illegal to take pictures of aircraft, especially their tail numbers.

News flash for those who think that: it's not - even the tail numbers. The FAA requires them to be conspicuous for a reason.

I'm pretty sure Airbus has / had a partnership with Revell of Germany, which is a company that produces plastic model kits. Over at the Aerosoft forums Mathijs Kok of Aerosoft also mentioned something about getting drawings from Airbus for their AirbusX project. Probably money changed hands at some points in both cases, but it would seem Airbus is not opposed in principle to working with hobby companies. Also the whole A <380 - love at first flight marketing campaign is aimed at possible passengers rather than airline executives directly, so I'm sure they could justify working with a hobbyist fan-base from a business point of view too.

 

 

 

I partially disagree. For systems and procedure modelling you can get pretty far with data from an airline, especially if they give you access to the FC-manuals and the tech manuals. To make an accurate flight model however you're going to need a bunch of data that an airline won't have (because it would be pretty useless to them unless they want to develop their own sims in-house). Sure you could try to reverse engineer based on publicly available data and if you're an expert at flight dynamics you could probably get there with a lot of pilot input and tweaking, but geting a data-set from the manufacturer would be a lot easier. Performance tables and the like tell you the numbers you should be getting out of your flight model at the end, but not how to set up your flight model.

 

As an example consider the pitch rate: this is determined by (IIRC, flight dynamics was a couple of years ago): the change of aerodynamic moment of the main wing due to change of angle of attack, the change of aerodynamic moment of the horizontal stabiliser due to change of angle of attack (of the horizontal stabiliser) and the change in aerodynamic moment due to deflection of the elevator.

Now imagine one of your test pilots tells you 'when I pitch up the rotation feels a bit slow', which of those numbers should you change? And by how much? When you've tweaked those numbers so you're happy with them the next question is, for which range of speeds, configurations and flight conditions are those numbers valid?

An aircraft manufacturer will already have a complete dataset that can answer all those questions. It's not impossible to do yourself (especially if you're willing to settle for 'we fudged it a bit and now it's close enough'), but a partnership will make things a lot easier.

 

Last small side-note, I'm sure most Airbus employees are just as passionate about aviation as most airline employees. The chances of an Airbus employee considering helping an add-on developer as a hobby rather than work are about the same as for an airline employee.

 

Are you just making this up or does this come from facts? I have spent a fair bit of my adult life working with LVL-D sims, and helping create performance calculators (hense the name Flex)

 

The data that is used and provided by the manufacturers for LVL-D simulators cost a huge amount of money (and I mean huge) the bulk of that data is useless for a crude platform like FS9 or FSX.

 

Another myth that many simmers seem to beleive is that these multi million $ boxes are completely accurate. They only perform well within a certain envelope and then it becomes guess work because Boeing/Airbus etc dont actually have the full data. Lets take AF447 for example, nobody knew how the A330 would perform in those conditions, and that includes Airbus, because the data did not exist. Before the FDR was found most where perplexed that a heavy aircraft could fall almost vertically tail first.

 

Regards

Are you just making this up or does this come from facts? I have spent a fair bit of my adult life working with LVL-D sims, and helping create performance calculators (hense the name Flex)

 

The data that is used and provided by the manufacturers for LVL-D simulators cost a huge amount of money (and I mean huge) the bulk of that data is useless for a crude platform like FS9 or FSX.

 

Another myth that many simmers seem to beleive is that these multi million $ boxes are completely accurate. They only perform well within a certain envelope and then it becomes guess work because Boeing/Airbus etc dont actually have the full data. Lets take AF447 for example, nobody knew how the A330 would perform in those conditions, and that includes Airbus, because the data did not exist. Before the FDR was found most where perplexed that a heavy aircraft could fall almost vertically tail first.

 

Regards

 

It's based on what I remember from my flight dynamics lectures, which were about three years ago. I specialised in structural integrity after my bachelor's (you get to break more stuff and don't get airsick :P). I'm aware that Level-D sims have limitations, especially when it comes to stall and post-stall behaviour, since there is little to no data available and there's even a lack of a good theoretical understanding of what should be going on with the airflow in the first place. Even so, as you point out a level-D sim will have a much higher level of fidelity than flight simulator.

 

My main point is that partnering with an airline will not give you much data on which to base your flight model, since to an airline that data is not of much use. E.g. an airline wants performance tables, not the data you can use to make them yourself. To make a good flight model in FS you would need something like the dataset used in level-D sims, though obviously it would not need to be as extensive, since FS' simulation is a lot cruder.

 

I could be wrong but I see two ways you could go about getting such a dataset: 1. get it from the manufacturer (basically buy/beg for a slimmed down version of a level-D flight model dataset) 2. get an experienced flight dynamicist to tweak/fudge/torture the parameters used by flight sim's flight model until the plane feels right (or right enough) in flight sim.

 

What part of my post did you feel was inaccurate?

Hey John,

 

I do understand what you are saying, however I still fail to see how this applies to FS. PMDG and a few other dev's have mastered some amazing techniques to bypass the limitations in FS however we are still using the same basic platform.

 

I am sure they are benefiting immensely from having approval from Boeing in other areas of the development process, and I am happy for them because it benefits all of us as simmers. However, my personal opinion is the relationship they have is not enabling them to create super realistic flight dynamics that will give them an advantage over other devs that work closesly with an airline.

 

One last thing, whatever the flight dynamics guy's are doing is brilliant considering what they have to work with. When I first bought the PMDG 744 years ago I spent the first few months trying to catch PMDG out with a whole bunch of things, one simple thing initially impressed me, when I slowly applied full rudder the aircraft behaved exactly like the sim and began to roll unlike every other aircraft out there that would simply yaw. It is that kind of attention to detail that sets them apart.

 

Kind regards

Sure it's definately not impossible to create a convincing flight model without a partnership with the manufacturer, it's just quite a lot harder. An airline has lots of data on the needed output of your flight model (e.g. performance tables, pilots' experience of how the plane sould feel), but they won't have much of the data you need to build the flight model itself. So basically if you only have an airline partnership you will need to reverse engineer the flight model from the performance tables and the comments of your test pilots.

 

On the other hand the manufacturers can (should they wish to) give you all the parameters you need to build the flight model (at least for the range of validity they have data for). Of course you will still need to tweak those to account for FS's limitations, but that's probably (not a dev, so can't say for sure) easier than reverse engineering everything.

 

Of course a lot depends on the exact nature of the relationships, but specifically for the flight model working with a manufacturer will give you an advantage over someone only working with an airline, simply because the manufacturer has access to more data (of course this assumes the manufactuer is willing to share).

 

In think in the end what I'm saying can be summed up as: you don't need a manufacturer partnership to get a super-realistic flight model, but it probably does make it easier to get there. Then again I could be wrong :).