Flight Simulator controls

As I explained in my blog entry, I’ve been absent because work has kicked in hard, and because my hobby time right now is spent working on an R/C glider that had been gathering dust for years. Maybe once I get that done I can get back to making sawdust in something other than balsawood, but then I thought “maybe my entries here don’t have to be all about furniture and boxes”, and I realized that I had a few other projects lying around that were made out of wood that I’m kinda proud of.

So maybe I don’t have to be totally absent while the work overwhelms me. And maybe I can dig up enough pictures that I can write some stuff while I wait for the computer to finish its assorted things. Here’s a testament to… well… maybe not great woodworking, but a little coolness that some scraps of bike parts, coat hanger wire and some waxed birch (that sounds vaguely obscene, for some reason) can create…

Almost two years ago my sweety and I took a trip to Alaska. I was just about to dive into a project that’s chewed through a lot of our resources, and her comment was “either this won’t matter in the grand scheme of things, or this’ll be the last trip we can afford to take for a loooong time, so we may as well do it right”. We went, had a fantastic trip, stayed mostly clear of the touristy cruise ship areas, but towards the end of the trip we did end up in Juneau, and we took the obligatory helicopter flight up on to the glacier.

When we got back, and Charlene (my sweety) said “that was so cool, I’d love to learn how to fly a helicopter!”. Now I’m as much a pushover for an excited woman as the next guy (probably more, actually), but having just got back from that trip and dedicated a bunch of our savings to the project I’m currently embarked upon, I was reluctant to call up flight schools and figure out just how much it cost (not as much as you’d think, but she’s also not the most coordinated person in the world, so there’d be a lot more hover practice at however many hundreds of dollars an hour than there would be for, say, me).

I looked around a bit, and an amazing number of people reported that learning the basics of helicopter flight on a simulator actually helped them when they went to fly the real thing. The one caveat was that a usual sprung joystick didn’t work for such things, to make the simulator training useful, you had to have real pedals and a non-centering cyclic stick (the one that controls which direction the helicopter goes in, the other one, down at the left side, is called the collective, and controls how much lift the main rotor is generating… roughly, these things actually get really complex really fast).

Now at the time we were living really lean. But I thought about the problem a bit, found out that FlightGear was free, had a semi-decent helicopter simulation, and ran on Linux (my favorite OS), so I splurged on a few bucks at the hardware store and the $20 or so it cost to buy a cheap joystick that had roughly the number of axes of control I needed, took that sucker apart and made some sawdust.

These pictures don’t have the cyclic stick completed (I took the original joystick handle and mounted it on the stick so that the auxiliary controls were available), and it’s gotten less use than I’d hoped (which is good, because it shows that flight training might not have been followed through on as fervently as it’d have to be to make it worthwhile), but it was a good kick in the pants on a number of fronts to realize that some things were easier than I’d imagined them to be.

A little bit more rambling on the project.

-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/User:DanLyke