PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - The old Concorde Sim at Filton
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Old 20th Feb 2007, 17:01
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Iron City
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: USA
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Carrier Landings as party pieces were fairly common in the late 1970s/early 1980s (United Airlines in St. Louis had a 707 simulator with carrier landing capability).
There was even carrier landing capability in some U.S. Navy simulators but as far as I know I built the first one that was a real simulation, not a party piece. It was the A-6E night carrier landing trainer and contained a real model of a real aircraft carrier as well as appropriate visuals (computer generated). Unlike the party pieces this was a real simulation because it became obvious that the A-6E was a bit more of a handfull than desired to get aboard and too many people were killing themselves (and banging up aircraft in the process) and there was no dual control TA-6.
Doing this simulation properly was a real trick, and a fair amount of art was needed for the visuals of the FLOLS and other deck lighting to make it work. As the ol A-6 is now not in the active inventory don't know what happened to the trainers, but would be great for leisure centers and amusement parks if bought for 10 cents on the dollar (they cost about 12M each to build and were worth every penny)
Would be very interesting to see the software for the Concorde simulation, as transonic is always a trick and would like to see how the different possible configurations (weight, CG shifts, v. geometry nose, etc) were done. How far into unusual flight conditions did the training simulators go? And who had the guts to collect the ground truth real data to build them?

edited for fat fingers
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