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A flight simulator is a system that tries to replicate, or simulate, the experience of flying an aircraft as closely and realistically as possible. more...
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The different types of flight simulator range from video games up to full-size cockpit replicas mounted on hydraulic (or electromechanical) actuators, controlled by state of the art computer technology.
Flight simulators are extensively used by the aviation industry for design and development and for the training of pilots and other flight deck crew in both civil and military aircraft.
Engineering flight simulators are also used by aerospace manufacturers for such tasks as:
development and testing of flight hardware. Simulation (emulation) and simulation techniques can be used, the latter being where real hardware is fed artificially-generated or real signals (sTimulated) in order to make it work. Such signals can be electrical, RF, sonar and so forth, depending on the equipment to be tested.;
development and testing of flight software. It is much safer to develop critical flight software on simulators or using simulation techniques, than development using aircraft in flight.;
development and testing of aircraft systems. For electrical, hydraulic and flight control systems, full-size engineering rigs sometimes called 'Iron Birds' are used during the development of the aircraft and its systems.;
History
Because powered flight is hazardous to attempt untrained, from the earliest days various schemes were used to enable new pilots to get used to the controls of the plane without actually being airborne. For instance, the Sanders Teacher was a complete aircraft mounted on a universal joint and facing into the wind, able to rotate and tilt freely. Another early flight simulator of about 1910 was built using a section of a barrel mounted on a hoop.
A number of electro-mechanical devices were tried during World War I and thereafter. The best-known was the Link Trainer, produced by Edwin Link in the USA and available from 1929. This had a pneumatic motion platform driven by bellows giving pitch, roll and yaw, on which a replica generic cockpit was mounted. It was designed for the teaching of Instrument (cloud) flying in a less hazardous and less expensive environment than the aircraft. After a period where not much interest was shown by professional aviation, the US Army Air Force purchased four Link Trainers in 1934 after a series of fatal accidents in instrument flight. The world flight simulation industry was born. Some 10,000 Link Trainers were used in the 1939-45 war to train new pilots of allied nations. They were still in use in several Air Forces into the 1960s and early 1970s.
The Celestial Navigation Trainer of 1941 was a massive structure 13.7 m (45 ft) high and capable of accommodating an entire bomber crew learning how to fly night missions. In the 1940s, analog computers were used to solve the equations of flight, resulting in the first electronic simulators.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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