Cool. Doing what?f working in an aviation-related business
-
Enjoy XS650.com? Consider making a donation to help support the site.
XS650.com receives a small share of sales from some links on this page, but direct donations have a much greater impact on keeping this site going.
Painting Tins. No really...
- Thread starter Jim
- Start date
Flight simulators. Although my affinities may have been on the shop floor, my job was in program management. Had lots of friends on the floor though. Got to spend a lot of time in the field doing installations and acceptances in places I may not have otherwise have had the opportunity to see (Europe, Scandinavia, Australia).Cool. Doing what?
My company, Hughes Aircraft, built the flight simulator for the F/A 18. While at NAS Lemore, CA I was called over from the RADAR lab to help in system calibration sometimes. Actually, I was used as a test subject. They would strap me in the cockpit, give me instructions in my headset to call up different RADAR mode, throttle settings, weapon selections to verify the system code. It was a full cockpit on a stationary platform. The pilots head was located ~center of a 40 foot diameter dome. A series of projectors displayed on the dome walls the surroundings of the pilot. Everything was displayed and you felt like you were flying. Climb, the visuals rolled down, clouds, sun etc. Dive and the visuals rolled up and the ground, farms, cities, highways came into view and got bigger and bigger rapidly until you pulled up. Turn, roll, loop. It did it all. When they put aggressors into the mix I generally lasted 4 or 5 seconds...
No doubt... combat flying / pilots is a different story altogether.
My employer, CAE, built both commercial and military flight simulators. These are mounted on a six-degrees-of-freedom hydraulic motion system, making the physical sensations of pitch/roll/yaw real. This is mandated by FAA (and other regulatory bodies) regulations to obtain what is referred to as Level D certification, which means that a pilot can obtain his/her type rating with zero flight hours. The simulator includes a mounted visual system with a 180 * horizontal field-of-view (FOV) and +/- 20* vertical FOV. Three projectors project through a backscreen onto a mylar mirror, which is pulled into the correct spherical shape by vacuum pumps are used, all this within a dome mounted on the sim platform. The visual imagery is of course geo-specific. If you want to fly to LAX, you see LA, the surrounding area as well as LAX of course. You want other air traffic, a fuel truck driving around the apron, lav trucks servicing stationary aircraft at the gate, just select them on your visual control page at the instructor's station.
The most complex sim project I worked on was a commercial/military Bell 412/212 sim that also had a cockpit vibration system to replicate the type-specific vibration spectrum of the airframe. This was done by instrumenting an airframe and recording the vibrations under different conditions and then replicating the spectrum with the vibration platform. This device was used for commercial and military flight training, the commercial aspect being primarily aimed at North Sea oil platform support pilots.
It was a very interesting place to work!
Last edited:
What a great name for a band...
OK, sorry for the hijack...this is Jim's thread about painting tins. I'll cease and desist...
No worries. When I taught at AIM, I built a somewhat amateurish flight sim as a teaching aid. It had to be portable and narrow enough to fit through a classroom door. I seem to have lost the pics of the finished sim, but here's some of the under construction pics. The outside world was displayed through a projector (the most expensive part of the project) mounted on the roof of it. That projected onto the classroom wall, and with the lights turned out, it was actually pretty realistic.
Someday I'll make another for here at home. Other than my neighbor Jeff's Great Lakes, I don't get many chances to fly anymore. It would be nice to help my "flying bug."
It was a self contained system. Push it in a classroom, park it 8-10ft from a wall, plug it in, turn it on and teach basic ground handling or flying.
Pretty good effort, Jim! Are those displays graphic emulations? If so, even greater props to you. When I started at CAE, real instruments were used and driven as in the aircraft (with the exception of those that could not be, like standby horizons). CAE then developed what was called the re-host solution, wherein actual black box operational software (an FMS, for example) was run on a PC providing absolute fidelity. As "steam gauges" became less-and-less prevalent in favor of displays and LCDs became readily available, emulations of glass -cockpit displays were developed. I am not completely current with simulation technology today, but it is my general understanding that the simulated cockpit is now virtually 100% simulated.
Yes. It took a pretty good computer to handle all of it (read that expensive), but X Plane (think it was ver 11) allows you to move the panel displays pretty much anywhere you want. It's a simple matter of drag and drop... and resize from the main display to wherever you want it. You then save that config and that's how it comes up next time you power it up. X plane is a damn good simulator program.
Agree on the capabilities of XPlane. When I started in the simulation industry, such a thing was unthinkable. Sims were powered by huge mainframes (DEC Vax 11/780's. if I recall). When CAE first got a full simulation package running on a PC, it was revolutionary. That would have been late 80's / very early 90's.
Per my previous Hughes simulator post,,, The computer room 40'x40' (roughly) with false floors so a Halon fire suppression system could evacuate the area.... Cruel...
Why cruel? It was standard practice then and still is, no (computer room fire suppression)?
Directly after I retired from the Navy, I went back to work for NAVELEXSYSCOM (Naval Electronics Systems Command) as an equipment installer. The Comm Center in the building I worked in just before I retired was completely gutted, expanded to about double it's initial size and all new equipment installed. We installed raised decking not for fire suppression but as an AC plenum and place to put conduit and wiring troughs. Laying out the grid and installing the standoffs for the deck plates was a major pain in the ass. Being able to run all the conduit and wiring BEFORE setting the deck plates did make life a lot easier.
I lost track of how many 56 pair cables I terminated. I had the 56 pair color code memorized...
I lost track of how many 56 pair cables I terminated. I had the 56 pair color code memorized...
I was thinking if you are stuck in the room.... It was a hasty thought.
Well, if the Halon goes off, be a good idea to vacate, me thinks
!Superdriver
XS650 Addict
beautiful
Has anybody ever asked Jim to paint a tank in the San Francisco colors?
I ask this question early in the 2nd quarter.
I ask this question early in the 2nd quarter.
Request denied. Resubmit in 90 days for final disapproval.
Last edited:
Pulling for the Chiefs Chiefs here. Hoping for a discount on my Gold bike project...
Special Superbowl rules on "nearby receivers" for grounding?
Similar threads
