Hi everyone. Thanks for welcoming me to the AVSIM community.

 

I'm a long-time simmer, but not really seriously until the past six weeks or so. How long-time? My first time in a flight simulator was in a WWII Link trainer that my Junior High English teacher had stashed away in a storage room at the school (he flew B-17s in the Big War). My first time on a PC simulator was SubLogic FlightSimulator 1 on the Apple II (there’s nothing like green screen wireframe for an immersive experience), and over time I used SubLogic / MSFT FlightSimulator on the Commodore 64, Amiga, and PC, and then X-Plane on the Mac. I guess in some ways you could say I've been in the hobby since the beginning. And while I always had fun, the experience was never quite realistic enough for me to stick with it consistently.

 

That all changed about six weeks ago when I was trolling YouTube and came across a bunch of great home cockpit flight simulation videos. One guy in particular – Flight Sim Liberty – really got my attention with the C172 simulator that he’d built in his home. At that point it sort of dawned on me that I could build my own cockpit and take my passion to the next level as a full-fledged hobby. A few weeks of pretty intense research, planning, and CAD design later and I was ready to build a GA cockpit. The design was roughly modeled on a Cessna 182, but with enough flexibility that I could fly multiple aircraft and physically a bit wider and taller than the real thing. A good buddy who flies Beechcraft for a living came to town, we went to Home Depot, and shortly thereafter we were building a flight simulator.

 

Six weeks later and the simulator is for the most part done. I’ve learned a ton, especially here on AVSIM. THANK YOU for that. I’ve also learned that a basement flight simulator, probably like a boat or a real aircraft, is an ongoing process. Fix one thing over here, and you end up unintentionally tweaking something over there. But that’s a cool thing about it, to me: you have to love the process, because in some ways the destination never comes.

 

Here are some pics of the basement sim ...

 

The CAD design:​

 

 

Panel construction:

 

Framed and paneled:

 

 

Trimmed out:

 

 

Ready for action:

 

 

Night flying:

 

 

Day flight:

 

 

There's more about the build at www.ontheglideslope.net for anyone who's curious. Finally, here's a vid of a recent totally against protocol flight at KEGE:

 

 

Apologies for the cheesy music: YouTube stock. Also the monitors aren't quite perfectly aligned, but it's getting close, and the old (old, OLD) GoPro also doesn't represent well in low light. But it's enough to get the picture.

 

As you can tell, I am LOVING my new hobby and am sort of enthusiastic about it. Again, thanks for all your help, for being so welcoming, and for building such a great community for us here online.

 

Basement Fly Guy

Impressive! Thank you for sharing. I don't have the space or the budget for such an immersive setup. B) ....so... when's the A380 cockpit being built? 

Space was no problem - an empty basment room. Budget ... well ... let's just say I had some mid-life-crisis savings in place, and that my wife is getting whatever she likes for a good, long while. I also got the vast majority of the stuff in a firesale auction I won on EBay. Otherwise it would have taken a lot longer to get the stuff together.

 

LOL about the A380 cockpit. Why stop there? Let's build this! http://360vr.com/2011/06/22-discovery-flight-deck-opf_6236/

Words fail me... All I can say is awesome!  From a CAD to FLIGHT.  And even if I could do it that, living in South Florida - well no basements...

Wow, cool!

Very nice Indeed,  all the best of luck to you  :smile:

Very nice,  where did you purchase your avionics from?

 

Cheers

Martin

Ok, went to your website and all the information is there....thanks for posting!

Thanks everyone for the very kind feedback and the nice welcome. Martin, I know you checked out the website. As you can see it's all Saitek. The only exception are the main display (which is an iPad running instruments) and the GTN 750 GPS, which I have running on a 7-inch touch-screen display (and which works really really well, BTW).

 

My next task is to try to configure a switch on one of the panels to switch the instrument on the 7-inch between the GTN and ASN's radar instrument. Something to try to do this Friday night ...

 

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Basement Fly Guy

www.ontheglideslope.net

Can't help but to reply to your thread.  I am blown away at how quickly you have transformed your basement into a fully working home cockpit, excellent work BFG! 

Very nice - thanks for sharing and welcome

Thanks everyone. I'm truly flattered by your compliments!