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Aircraft Design & Control

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PCQ Bureau
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Take pilot training. Training a pilot is not only costly, but also a continuous process. Much of this training is done on aircraft simulators. Simulators range all the way from a standard PC equipped with software and a joystick to life-sized mockups of commercial jets.

Let us start at the bottom end. High Plains Engineering has a basic aircraft simulator (called the Engineering version), which is just a standard PC with a monitor. The pilot seat is mounted on wheels, with an optional hydraulic control stick. The simulation software runs on the PC and shows the display on the monitor. That is all. This is even less equipped than a high-end flight simulator gaming station! This one is used for lab tests, and the like.

 
Internet on Air



You can now check your e-mail, browse the Internet, and even hold a videoconference while flying
Designing the 777



The computing resources involved in the design of this aircraft 

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Moving on, we come across the full cockpit version of the same. This one is made to look like the front of the fuselage of a small aircraft. A multiprocessor PC running Win NT runs the simulations. 

At the high end, there are the commercial-aircraft simulators that require Mainframe power. The 777 simulator, for example, which is almost a full mockup of the plane, requires not one or two but eleven IBM RS 6000-390 machines to power it. Many other commercial-systems simulators use Encore’s Multisel real-time comput- ing systems. Simulators for older aircraft are built around the VAX. Simulators for the Boeing 767, for example, were built circa 1991 around three VAX 3800’s. 

Another industry that is seriously into flight simulators is the gaming industry. Flight-simulator games like the F 22 Raptor and

Microsoft Flight Simulator mimic aircraft control and airport details to the finest. 

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And, really hard-core flight sim enthusiasts even have special gaming equipment built around their gaming workstations in order to make the gaming experience as realistic as possible. 

The technology used in aircraft simulators also has many other not so exotic applications. For example, the Strathclyde University developed a system that would make it easier to design buildings for the physically impaired. Basically, it allows someone seated in a wheel chair to virtually navigate a building before it is built.

Krishna Kumar

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