If you've never flown a real force feedback system (not a toy) - it's pretty amazing. Once you've experienced it everything else you touch just seems downright awful. I would take a force feedback Yoke alone over an entire full motion sim without it.
At this years AOPA convention in Fort Worth I was able to fly both the Redbird sims (which I also have time in for my instrument training) and the Precision Flight Controls sim. The PFC sim experience just destroyed the Redbird and it was because of the force feedback in the yoke and the tactile experience overall.
I asked the PFC representative how much just the Yoke would cost that was in that sim (the model shown here ) and he stated he has $6,000 in parts alone just in the yoke's force feedback mechanism. So the price point this project is promising is a strong value. And they're doing it right using an architecture that will be open and highly extensible.
I'm fairly new on the forums - but I do wish the community would step up and help out. $75k is nothing to start a business or launch a product if you've ever done it. I'm sure they could spend $10 in legal fees alone without blinking.
May is a long time to wait, and the Christmas holiday season is a sorry time to hit me up for more money, but I'll be putting my card down for $500 early production unit. I hope others do the same. Here's the link in case you missed it. And for the record I'm not affiliated with the effort in any way.
