Development of an Affordable and High-Fidelity Flight Simulation Training Device

Flight simulation training device (FSTD) is considered one of the most useful equipment for pilot training and flight skill evaluation. However, high-level FSTDs are very expensive in the commercial market due to the complexity of the system integration and the customization for each aircraft model. In this paper, a solution to develop an affordable and high-fidelity FSTD is proposed. An FSTD of Beech 1900C regional aircraft has been accomplished. The development process, system configuration and component design of the Beech FSTD are presented. This FSTD consists of a duplicated cockpit and a computational platform. The duplicated cockpit contains a side-by-side dual-pilot flight control deck. Well-designed instruments, control panels, force-feedback flight control system and engine power control system together with a 3-channel direct-project visual cueing system and an audio cueing system are integrated in this cockpit. The computational platform is equipped with a set of personal computers (PCs), which is used to construct a computational cluster. In this PC-based cluster. a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation software, named X-Planc, and the interface software and firmware are adopted to drive the cockpit hardware to establish the simulation environment. The system architecture and integration method of this Beech FSTD are described. The system simulation result and performance validation are also presented to demonstrate the feasible design of this affordable and high-fidelity FSTD.