When it comes to flying, one of the ways to become a better pilot is through flight simulations, but these can often feel unrealistic.
As research for our January 2015 feature story about stealth new aircraft, we created virtual models of the coolest new drones in the sky—the Northrop Grumman RQ-180 and the BAE Systems Taranis. Both are top-secret projects. In fact, the RQ-180 is so “black-world” that it's only been spotted once or twice, flying high over the U.S. Air Force's remote Area 51 in Nevada. Nonetheless, leaked information exists on both projects, and in the right hands it can speak volumes about their capabilities.
In 2004, I sat down in a flight simulator at Scaled Composites with test pilot and engineer Peter Siebold. He'd built the simulator—a precise replica of the cockpit in Scaled's radically unconventional SpaceShipOne (SS1). That ship was the predecessor of SpaceShipTwo (SS2), which broke apart over the Mojave Desert on Friday. Siebold was at the controls at the time of the accident, with Mike Alsbury as co-pilot
Some people golf. Some build miniature train sets. James Price tinkers with the full-blown flight simulator he's been building in the nose of a Boeing 737 jetliner in his garage for the past two decades. The air traffic controller and aviation enthusiast is now one of only a few people in the world who have built this kind of flight sim in an actual aircraft nose. And he's among only a handful of people in the world with a toy this cool.
Clint Fishburne, a regional-airline pilot based in Atlanta, wanted to help his children develop the body movement and muscle memory necessary to fly and land a plane. With the cost of commercial flight simulators starting at $2,800, though, Fishburne, a longtime PopSci reader, decided to make one from scratch. Building the plywood-and-PVC plane, frame and control stick was relatively easy. The challenge was making a platform that could mimic a plane's motion and that was strong enough to support and move a 34-kilo child.
Barco, a maker of large-format projector technologies, has just unveiled what it is calling a breakthrough in flight simulator technology, and for all the hardware involved we're inclined to agree that his must be something big. The new flight simulator dome - it's really more like a sphere - offers state of the art high-res visuals and full 360-degree views, allowing fighter pilot trainees to spot other aircraft from 20 kilometres away.