Hi behind me is one of the world's most excite the world's mayhem. World's most expensive I'll go with that people younger. Hi behind me is the younger brother of the world's most expensive do-it-yourself full-motion flight simulator and I've done another video on that linked in down below. I've also done a full tour of the previous ones so this is an upgrade to the previous one and I've done a video on all the hardware and software solution that drives and interfaces all this.

but this video will be going inside and under and taking a look at this full original 747 cockpit and it costs a lot of time and money here instead to get this from the US here in Sydney. So let's check it out and I'm here with Rod Redwyne who is the designer of the From Simulator Solutions who is the designer of all the hardware and software which we had done in the previous video. So Rod tell us about this frame although we did in the previous video. But let's walk around and have a look at this original 747 copy that doesn't look original at the moment.

it is original. Some of the cool things she can say about it. If you start to have a look here, you can get an idea of how thick the how thick the skin of the aircraft is. So it's about 3 or 4 mil thick in places that get to even pick up where this double is and a little bit thinner.

in other places double is is where there's two layers of skin right? Or there's a layer of skin, and there's a rib or a string or something underneath it. Why would they have two layers of skin? in areas where they join the skin together? You often in some places you'll double it over, which saves on seams. In other places there are there but jointed and also filled with a silicon like compound as well. Absolutely.

And the ever the ever wonderful PE T braid that we use as well down there. It's fantastic for keeping wire bundles together. Alright, so this is a 747, 400 and 400 cockpit, so the keener eyes will see the Star Alliance logo still stuck on the side. They're still on there.

United Airlines Are a proud member of the Star Alliance Clearly yeah, this came from one of the dismantlers in Tupelo Mississippi There's a number of dismantlers that operate around the world in Tupelo Mississippi over on the over on the west coast. the In California Also plenty of dismantlers in other places around the world. Big one in the Cotswolds airport in the UK as well and you don't have to be a somebody to order to get one of these. You can just contact them and go hey.

I Want a 747 cockpit and I'll sell it. You can't tip depends upon who they are. There's certainly no regulations, but there are unfortunately a lot of tire kickers around and who waste a lot of times. AOA L Want a cockpit? I Want a cockpit and they'll come back and say yeah, it'll cost you 30 grand I Still want to cook? Bit like I Send us a deposit and they disappear.

Yeah. So also, the logistics involved their aircraft dismantle is for them. An airframe is money. It's cheaper for them to cut this up using a giant claw or an excavator than it is to cut a cockpit off and try and sell it.

especially if somebody's going to muck around and take a lot of time to get it. How do they get it off? What condition does it have to be in? How many specific parts do you want to keep on it? That's it's. quite a complex operation. No, they actually they they will buy the the entire Hulk from the airline, whether it comes with or without engines and certain roadable spares.

And I should mention while I'm here what a rotor them spare is. So roadable spares are very popular in the aviation industry. Apart rolls off the manufacturing line or to take a chair. That's our seat.

You know, in a cockpit. that's a good example. So the seat rolls out of the Apeco manufacturing line with a serial number. Now that seat could be fitted to a 747 with United Airlines and after X number of years the seat is pulled out, it's sent off to be reconditioned.

It still has the same part number and that part might end up with KLM or it might end up with a different airline, might end up with Qantas. And so these parts. These roadable spares. They can be 0 times many times in their life.

they still have the common serial number and you can trace every single thing that has happened to each one of these items. every modification that's been made, every time it was installed, every time it was removed. No, not at all. And in the old days, and probably still the case with a lot of the parts.

when you buy a roadable spare, they actually come with a wad of one-inch-thick paperwork which lists every single person that's done anything to this. throughout the parts entire history. Somebody's repaired it. Somebody, somebody's repaired it, what the repair was, what the fault was, And that's one of the reasons why some of these parts are so expensive is because the amount of paperwork and the systems and the traceability that you need.

Because if unfortunately, an aircraft involved in an accident, people want to make sure that all of the parts in that aircraft were genuine and we're all working correctly and had been repaired correctly. Wow So that's why in crash investigations probably take years, Just absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, there's huge amounts of paperwork to go through, records that are kept for airframes, records that are kept for engines, all sorts of different logbooks, and then you start to get into the individual parts. and all of the parts have different manuals That apply to them which tell you how to tear the item down, what components you need to use with them, what testing values you know if you're testing a circuit, they even tell you how many ohms the circuit, ohms of resistance the circuit should have and what the rejection rate is.

The crimping tools we have. They have a Go slash no-go tool where you squeeze the crimping tool together. If the Go tool fits in, you're good. If the no-go tool fits in, you're no good.

You can't go with it. So the the level of detail is is astonishing. But for us we're healings and we don't respect a lot of that sort of stuff. The simulator enthusiasts absolutely right.

This is the actual look you can see. it's cut out. Here Here we go. I Turn my light on.

There we go. So this is an actual you can see. this actually comes from the actual 747. Absolutely.

So what? what you can see here is you can actually see the end of the Cope I Love a first officer's rudder pedals which is in this little box here with the carpet on the front of it so that's behind. There is the first officer's rudder pedals, you can see some cooling ducts, you can see some cooling manifolds, and then you can also start to see a whole stack of wiring in there which is part of it the Sim stack stuff. and oh yeah, there's more boards Up! More boards hidden up there. More Sims Deck boards, power supplies, distribution boards, Ethernet switches.

All sorts of wonderful stuff up in there. Oh, you can store dinner rails in there, so absolutely nice. Makes life very very easy. Clip them on and clip them off and there's an Ethernet switch.

Absolutely something you won't find in a regular 747. You'll actually find Ethernet switches in modern era planes as well. You will. Yes, a lot of the aircraft to use bus use different types of Ethernet buses.

So so yeah, it's quite surprising. So what is this cooling system for? What are these cooling pipes here? What are these for in the original aircraft? Which is it? This is the original aircraft. All of these pipes were used to either push cooled air into the into the cockpit or to remove hot air from the cockpit. So yes, the aircraft are pressurized, but they still need big circuit recirculation fans to move this huge body of air in and around the aircraft.

And as you will see when you get inside, these old fashioned incandescent bulbs can actually get quite some serious heat to them. Nice! So what is this assembly here that looks like steering on the front? This assembly here is actually the rudder pedal system. Yeah, and there's two of these. There's one on each side.

This one has had some modifications. this plates not original which is being in this additional plate is used for a for centering and trim mechanism. in the real aircraft. there are cables that mount onto here and these cables run off to the various control systems and linkages within the aircraft.

Because the 747 is still fly by cable, you can even if all the avionics fail, you can still land that puppy. Absolutely, it's a flyby cable. The aircraft what we call an electromechanical beast. So as I said the airframes based on the original 747 which first flew in the 60s and over time that made various modifications to the systems on board and when they remove the flight engineer when they moved from the 747 300 to 400.

A lot of those changes were to do with the electronic systems that were brought on board. So the system that the wing may still be the same, but there is a computer or some sort of electromechanical interface between the cockpit and the old systems in the aircraft. and there's the knows how much further would the nose extend out? I Think the nose came out another meter or so and then you had a raid on that that's on the front of that. That's just for our weather, isn't it? That's for the weather radar behind? No, no, that's all done through the it's Now through the Ats-v system which is where in the aircraft transponders which is where the aircraft actually talked to each other and tell each other where they are and what height they're at.

All right? let's have a look underneath. Yeah, if you want have a bit of a crawl under yeah and we can just have a look at some of the some of the places where they'll actually go to. And there's pulley up there for one of the older flight controls that would have been connected to the to the rudder system, the wonderful silver thing that you can see there hanging down underneath the floor, the silver cylinder that is a synchro synchro as opposed to a resolver. Yep, and that particular one is connected to the ailerons.

So as the pilot moves the ailerons, they're left in the right. That synchro will pick up the deviation left and right. There's another synchro buried up in there somewhere which control which is connected to the elevator. and there's another one somewhere around here which touched the rudder as well.

Whoa. what is that thing that's an elevator I Think that's the elevator centering mechanism. or it could be the aileron secondary mechanism, right? but it's all part of the aircraft. No.

I'm an aircraft mechanic at all. Absolutely yeah. And then what we've got over here is we've got the resolvers that are connected to the throttles. Aha.

So as opposed to a synchro which is a three-phase thing, the resolver is to basically to transformers and it's slightly different. Still gives a sign in a cause vellieux but in a different way and of course at a different voltage. Of course these Springs here traveling spring they are trampoline Springs so they're not original I Know yeah cables have been chopped out in all sorts of places. A lot of that was actually done before the before the simulator arrived here and you can see other stuff here and if you notice everything has got all of these yellow labels on them which tell you a lot about where the cable came from and what that's telling us is its connector Delta Four One, Two Nine five Juliette its wiring Loom Four Seven Six Zero tells us the position and it'll also tell us some other information.

You also have grounding blocks here, which is all the grounds will run into these and there of course riveted. An attach to the to the fuselage in the frame is way higher The frame as a ground. Yes, no no, everything is a common ground. okay and we've used that in the simulator as well.

but in the actual aircraft AC and DC share the same ground. generally not, they've they've worked all of that out. But what it does lead to is if you have a chafing problem and if you start to chafe on the wires and you can actually cause a short circuit in the aircraft as well there that one is that's new. Yes, that's to damp out the control forces.

So as you manipulate the controls in the cockpit here, it actually damped out the movement. Ah, and a lot of a lot of these functions are performed by the original aircraft field unit. So you have an elevator failure at an aileron fail unit which react to speed. They're connected to hydraulic systems and it's incredibly complex stuff.

and you still have cables that run the entire length of the fuselage as well. Wow That's impressive. I Have no idea of the weight of this at the moment, but it's not insubstantial and you can see the lovely green color that everything is, which is primer Green. Absolutely.

That's the rudder moving and you'll see that it's actually connected to the rudder synchro, which when we connect up, the rudder synchro will give us the position of the rudder pedals. I'm pushing on there now. Absolutely. and it'll translate to the flight controls in the simulator software.

Is there anything on this that you haven't that you go? Oh, we just won't bother hooking that up or is. or do you guys is 100 percent realism every single. So this projects not done unless every single thing. It's a law of diminishing returns.

At this stage, we can't see the point in hooking up the windshield wipers because it's never actually going to get the winds, but the windshields never actually got to get wet. but there Again, the windshield wiper motors incredibly complex so that they can move at the right speed so that they move into reverse. so they Park and they latch in place And it's just as I said, the engineering that goes into some of this stuff. It's just truly awe-inspiring so you can spend like a month just getting or weeks just getting the wipers to simulate properly.

Mind you, I think it took us a couple of days to actually work out the wiper switches because again, electromechanical. there's logic in the switch which translates to logic in different relay systems. And when you're sitting there trying to work out if I turn it into this position. Now I've got nothing connected.

But if I move into this position I've got one wire grounded. If I move to the next position I've got three wires grounded and the fourth position nothing's grounded. Hang on. How on earth do I get this logic to work? You can see where they've cut away.

You can see that they've just got in there with a big circular saw and just cut that right off. Yep, the angle grinder is your friend and somebody else probably bought the radar system. Absolutely, that's probably still in service. part of the that's the display system.

Ah, that's it. Yep, Yes sir. there's a couple of LCDs yeah and that's just an LCD controller which will be connected to a DVI VGA or HDMI card. So I think they're LG laptop screens from memory that we've used inside that are just the right size.

All right, let's go all right. We're inside the cockpit here and this is where you really need a wide-angle lens. I Do have a second little GoPro I set up, but right. Tell us all about the inside.

Well, where we start. Lee You see a lot of brown. A sea of brown. So everything in here is original.

Everything in here is original. Absolutely right. To the span. like the spare bulb to the spare bulb panel absolutely in the side of the cockpit.

Everything is original. There's a few things missing from the library, like the three and a half inch disk drive that still used to update the flight management computer. Really, there's a disk drive? There's a disk drive in here through the half inch disk drive. No, that is.

That is remarkable. Wow So everything, yet everything is original. I'll show you the doors. Yep, everything is.

and we've still got the original certificate of airworthiness on the back door as well. Nice. There it is. Yeah, but this is a new alloy frame on the back end.

That's correct. Yes, yeah. the cockpit actually rent the cockpit. Actually did go back further and we've shortened it for various reasons.

And what you see, there is the escape hatch. That's the Absolutely No. 7. It's a long way up.

It's a long way up. There's actually a series of descenders. There's four, what they call descenders yeah, which are steel cables attached to a braking mechanism. So the idea is you grab that from above the aircraft library and you climb up on the seat and you dive out the hatch and you use these descenders to gently lower you to the ground.

I Have heard from 747 pilots that have said nope, I'm going down with the ship rather than jump out of that hatch over the head and they might need to be shoved out of there as well. Absolutely every as opposed to the old simulator that we looked at, which was just a combination of a few like original panels and things. Yep, so the keen-eyed would notice that there's a difference with the throttles here. you've got different colours on them, they're a slightly different shape and the speed brake handle is slightly different.

So the speed brake handle is this one just there. So that's some of the differences. We have the genuine trim gauges which I think we might take back to the lab and tear one of those down because they're pretty fascinating. What's inside of the multifunction control display units? M CDU Multifunction? Yeah! multifunction control display units MCD Use here.

These are the genuine units, but we have installed a color LCD display behind there and we have actually guttered the the unit. And we use a Sim stack board to connect the keyboard matrix and also the various lights that will turn on at different stages depending upon what the aircraft is doing. Other cool little things: The transponder here operates at 115 Volts 400 Hertz The weather radar would you is airing four to nine. All it is is a couple of pots, some switches.

literally pots and switches. Yet it's got a whole series of Eric four to nine cards in there to allow you to control the left and right hand systems independently and it goes off and talks to all sorts of computers buried deep within the aircraft to to control the displays and show you the weather radar mate. Now the screens are the screen turn hooked up. Yet these are another area where we've not used the original components.

so these are just LCD displays of varying sizes sourced off some of the the online websites that people might know of. And that's mainly because the original displays 8-inch square displays. You try and find an eight inch square LCD panel. That's very, very difficult.

The original display units themselves. The screens. This particular aircraft had CRT displays in it. You can use them, but you have to install us an arrant symbol generator and a whole series of extra stuff to go with that.

Again, you've also got to have 115 Volts 400 Hertz and we're talking some serious current that those things would require as well. So for ease of assembly and time, we've actually gone for the screens that we put in here. and once you get up and flying, you really can't tell the difference. so will they be a square? Yes.

Will we have a we have some external bezels that will go on those and it'll make it look pretty authentic. Yeah! So what simulator software does this tie into? So this simulator is using Aero Winx PS 10 or Precision Simulator 10 PSX is it sometimes known by which is written by the Aero Winx company based out of Germany One guy has written this piece of software. He's been writing the software now for over 20 years. He started with version 1 and then jumped to version 10 and when I say it simulates 99.9 percent of the systems onboard.

It even simulates the circuit breakers on the panel buried down there. You were talking to me before this how you've got him to add some stuff. Oh absolutely. We found things that we thought that were there and they weren't there and we've required additional pieces of information and he's come back to us and said I always built this software so that it could be used in a simulator.

but you guys have just gone to a crazy extreme. He's actually been out here and he's seen the original Sim and he knows a number of the members of the community that are building these aircraft these 747 Sims So he always knew it was going to be a very, very complex simulator. But when we've started to come to him with some even more diverse and interesting requests, he's turned around and thought, okay, yeah, I can do that, I can send you the variable and you know We've also had animated discussions with him and many other members of the community, some of whom are engineers about how systems work and we have discovered so many differences between aircraft variants, different line numbers off the production line, different airline options. It's absolutely astonishing.

Just different planes from the same same airline? Yep, absolutely not. significant differences, but differences in aircraft logic? Absolutely not so much the pilot, but more from an engineer's perspective. And when you try to build a simulator as real as you can get it, you start to come across these things and you think, oh, say, why is that does that work Yeah, so there's some really interesting stuff that we've discovered and we've had some really interesting debates and we've crawled around underneath. We've looked at wiring diagrams and yeah, it's been an interesting experience.

It's a 20 year, Absolutely yes, just does. the 747-400 is it's There are There are other simulator systems for different aircraft, so the 737 and the A320 is serviced by Prosm and their plugins - my Cossacks Lockheed Martin's prepared which is what flight simulator used to be and they're an add-on and they don't simulate as much and they're not as detailed, but you can still build a pretty cool cockpit with those. And one of the things that PS 10 allows us to do is it allows us to do soft dimming of all the light circuits that we have and that wouldn't be no, no. So they just fall on Larry yet most of the time they're full-on blaring or you have to wire the lights through a rheostat or relay system.

So whereas what we do with the with the overhead lights up here is we look for the position of that pot and we feed that pot position back to the PS 10 simulator software. The PS 10 T simulator software then tells us what brightness level each and every one of these overhead panelists should be set to. so all we need to do is look at one, brightness vary or we need to look at the brightness variable for each panel and then we just set that variable. So when you turn the aircraft off, the lights go off, when you have certain systems turned on, the light to come on at 50% when there's a failure of a certain circuit, or if you pull a circuit breaker, the software takes care of all of those eventualities for us because some of these systems and buses are incredibly complex, especially when you get down to some of the lower level DC buses that are powered by two alternate AC buses.

And there's inverters. and there's rectifiers. and there's all sorts of crazy stuff around these simulators. So in a way this is kind of an improvement on the real 747.

Absolutely? Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. And you were telling me that? yeah? One of the reasons to get this as an upgrade is because these are just aircraft nodes and they want to rear the feel of the real switches. Well though, look at the real light bulbs instead of LEDs behind there. Absolutely.

Dave I Think you played around with some of the switches in the old Sim and you've touched some of the switches in the new city. It's just talk and show. You talk and change. It's the action of these quarries is is quite astonishing.

And they're a quarry is the name of the manufacturer that makes these switches. They're a quarry switch and if you have a look closely and you zoom into one of these, you'll notice that there's actually a shutter in there. There's a shutter that closes as you pull up. it says on and then there's a light underneath here that says off And so we turn that back on again and the light turns out fantastic.

The other one had LED displays. Absolutely. These are Absolutely. They're just astonishing.

Yep, as they bounce around backwards and forwards, that's absolutely fantastic. Oh, we can make them appear. We can make them disappear, turn it into mark. If we wear it in in crews, it would go into decimal mark mode.

No, actually we talked to this using three, four or five independent ARINC buses. Oh that is whole panel is airing. Yep. So I think there's three FCC and to TCC buses we actually paired.

We actually parallel the three and the two buses so there's only two physical Eric devices talking to it. but that's how we make that work. So these panels are all. They're all wired up individually.

All the individual ones go back into your boards into our boards and what we'll do is is, we'll pop one of these panels out. Yeah, and we can have a look at the exciting stuff. So these connectors here induce fasteners, don't turn it on, take it apart as we say on the EEV blog DS Ed U.s. Duce and they interface to a Deuce Rail.

So here we have a panel coming out with the absolutely beautiful wiring that we've put back in there. As you can see, we've reused the labels and the lovely Canon connectors. I can even get these ones off so you? Yep. So we had to deepen the existing connectors and then we had to work out which pins we needed to use repin them all with the wires.

But before we did that we also did continuity testing within the back of the panel's because the wiring diagrams vary between aircraft and fleets and panel numbers and the panels that are in here were not the same panels that came out of the aircraft when it was retired. Oh, they work so they have been independently sourced. Absolutely blank chassis, They stripped it, seats were out, the seats were gone, the throttles were still here, but the pedal steel pedestal was empty. All these bays were empty.

This was empty. Tire overhead was empty, the circuit breakers were still there. fortunately. Yeah, and what? I let you get you to do though, because I'll just hand this to you.

Tell me how warm that is. Oh I Can Yeah, that is warm. I Can feel that. Whoa, that's hot.

That's 40 degrees right there. Just that. And that's just the bolt. That's just the bowl.

It's just the bowl. Yep. Wow So what we'll do when we get, we'll give you some of these to take back to the lab and you can pull the front front faces off and have a look at the number of back lighting bulbs in there and how these things go together. Panel to figure it all out, to check it, to continuity, test it to figure out all this.

Probably do it and pull the wire or to create the looms. put them in program the board's it's probably two days of two days work. Yeah, yeah. I Got a few of those done a few of those before and what you'll also notice is that these connectors, despite the fact that they all look identical, they're all keyed differently so each connector will only fit into one specific so that one goes into there.

I Mean there's this one guy that one goes into there that's not. that's not us, that's the 747. So no one can goof it up. and you know these tell you this is J2 and you know there's a small, wonderful aircraft logic connector.

One connector to connect to three. obviously. obviously. Yep, it's the way.

I Count as well. Brilliant. So because like if a pilot just landed the 747 ever, ever, you know I want a regular flight and they indicated that that panel was out. Yep.

I would mark that on this service and mark that on the maintenance release. Yep, some guy can come in, pull it out sometimes, then pull it in and simply replace it. Absolutely logs it and when they replace, it won't be in the aircraft. You know those logs are all still retained by the airline.

and now it's a challenge. I Have to try and get this back into place hanging for the moment. Road What is a pilot by the way, Is it? Here's a flier: Former flight instructor? Yes. For light aircraft, the pilot can have a look on the maintenance release and see that the see what's been done, see what was unserviceable, how it's been fixed, Whether it has been fixed, you have minimum equipment lists in these aircraft which will specify certainly the that certain systems can be unserviceable when the aircraft just is dispatched.

and that's perfectly acceptable because not everything can always be prepared repaired in every port and also the time and the complexity of some of these repairs. A lot of the stuff is just simply pull the box out and put a new box in and a lot of the newer air buses and Boeing's they literally turn the aircraft off, turn the aircraft back on again. Then if they can't clear the fault, they'll actually go and look for it. It's probably a genuine fault now.

obviously turning an aircraft off and on again. It's not as straightforward as it may sound, and you have to make sure you don't do it when the passengers are on board because as you know when you're sitting there on the ground and all the lights turn off, you think, oh, it's gonna go on here. This has probably got article night Kant in it. The could even be Led assets.

Yeah, and but yeah, the new 787 to the new air buses. they've all got sort of polymer-based batteries them and the 787 had some big problems initially with battery fires I Remember firing? Yes, yeah, just behind the kid and the simple solution was they mounted the batteries in a steel box and vented the box was a great solution itself. The problem: Sometimes the low-tech solutions are the best backup. They ordinarily you'd be fly or they'd be continually charged in the Absolutely.

The. The modern aircraft are far more electrical that a lot of the old aircraft were, so there's a lot more electrical systems onboard and less and less pneumatic and hydraulic systems. whereas the 747 has got four independent electrical systems or generators plus the APU which can't be used in flight. It's got four independent hydraulic systems, and because it's got four engines, it's got four independent pneumatic systems as well.

Nice, so you've got multiple redundancy, but of course all of that comes with complexity. It comes with maintenance costs, it comes with the overall costs and it's it makes for an aircraft. As it gets older, it becomes very, very expensive to keep it going. And I think that's one of the things that's going to get to the A380 and they're talking about.

A lot of airlines have taken the A380 out of service and they're saying that the increased maintenance cost as the fluids get smaller will start to bite a little bit more. No, no, the production lines closed for the A380 and Singapore Airlines sent their first two back and I believe they were scrapped because they couldn't find an aircraft market for them. Here's market for them because the market change. Do you know they thought vigorous kind of this? Yeah, absolutely smaller planes.

and I think it also depends upon the the Airlines Emirates in Dubai they've got some. You know they they own something like 150 A380s. Massive numbers. but because absolutely yeah Yes yeah yeah.

Into and out of in, into and out of Dubai. So yeah. but it's interesting you look at the his these aircraft and the fuel efficiency and and what they've done with them over time. Can you tell us? Okay, let me see if I get the panel back in, get it back in the right way around and it's just a simple quarter turn on each of these and the panel's back in.

Now tell us about some of the other very nice cool feedback features like the control stick for example, you were talking about the mic how it has right now when you were landing landing 747s, the feedback to mechanical and no, no, they're not only the mechanical feedback but also the sounds. absolutely levers. So when you touch down in the 747 there's a few things that happen. So this little pin here, that's the gear override button now that will release which makes a funny little sound like that is it.

Let's get the as the relay and the solenoid in the back of that. Let's go. The pilot will hear that and then you'll hear the the speed break extend which makes a noise. There's also a linear actuator that drives that which we don't have installed yet so that makes a noise as you grab the reverse into reverse idle.

There are actually some physical interlocks that some airlines have buried in the throttle pedestal which will make a noise as they release and only in not until they've released can you actually engage the reverse thrust. So I will reverse. the doors will open on the side of the engine but it'll sit there in idle and you can't pull thrust on the reverses until the interlocks let go. Likewise, when you stow these you hear the noise as the as the the mechanical interlocks kick in again.

If you advance the throttles, the speed brake will retract itself. Then there's the relays that are underneath the floor and the main equipment Bay which all click and clunk. Pilot can hear all sorts of with some of the ambient noise. Yeah, because you do simulate when I was in the other Sim, you do actually simulate the ambient noise.

Absolutely. You've got to have the end because these aircraft are not quiet. Yeah, and the 747 due to its shape was actually very noisy aircraft with subs with slower supersonic flows over the windows and the top of the the top of the aircraft. And so that did significantly increase the noise.

Too significant a change. Yeah, and that leads to a lot of pilots. They'll have hearing loss in certain frequency ranges. Absolutely.

yeah. And one of the other things is there is actually a faint 400 Hertz hum in here. that's coming from these two units here. Why? Because they run for some unknown reason at 115 volts 400 Hertz So this device is 28 volts.

Yet these two things here. 115 volts 400 Hertz Humming inside? It's the transformer inside. Yeah, so the first thing they do is they take the hundred and fifteen volts. Step it down to 24 volts or 28 volts or something.

and and off they go. Different different manufacturers, manufacturers developed absolutely. Yeah. And as I said earlier, the great thing about aviation standards is the strange way that they're loosely applied at times.

Absolutely. And then some of the other cool things we've got up here is we've got the fire switches for the engines, which as you can hear, they're a real positive. And then as you twist them to discharge the bottles, that makes for a very, very realistic feel of those units. Yes, yes, they're a halo.

And bottles halo. Yeah, we're horribly environmentally unfriendly, but not than anybody doubted that for a moment. That's it. Great thing about Halon is it doesn't leave resin asti residues in the engine core itself, so it puts the fire out and doesn't damage the engine particularly badly.

They still use those in now, like data centers. Like if they're Google data centers and stuff like that filing. like if you're in there when that goes off, it's gonna extract all the air from that. Absolutely.

What's that? smoke? evac? Smoky? They're candle. This is really yeah. Again, some of the low-tech solutions are often the best. If there's smoke in the cockpit, what the pilots would do, they would reach up and they would pull this lever down.

Yeah, What that does is opens a 2-inch diameter give or take a hole in the top of the cockpit in the roof of the cockpit which causes because the fuselage is pressurized which causes all the air to rush up out the hole in the top of the cockpit right? So they put absolutely 30,000 feet So that's what you do. You pull the handle and it opens the hole. Well there's actually a funny story with that. There was a theory and you know this is only hearsay, but apparently a lot of the one of the Asian carrier Air Corps 747s the engineers kept finding matchsticks in the cop car.

What they discovered the pilots being a very inventive an engine ingenious bunch had discovered if you just open that and stick a matchstick in there a smidge you can have a smoke in the cockpit, it'll go out the smoke evac handle and nobody will be any any the wiser. And of course you will notice that we still have the old-fashioned ashtrays in the side of the cockpit. Yeah, you used to be our youngsters lutely in trains and everything else. And and the non-smoking section in quote marks was just like literally a seat in front of these smoking sections.

So absolutely what's going in the center console? So in here we have two more screens. Screen they're called the upper IKS and a screen here called the lower I. Guess an Eye Care stands for engine, Instrument and Crew Alerting system which tells you about all of the systems onboard the aircraft. And you've got this selector here which allows you to bring up the different screens whether it's the engines, the fuel door positions gear, and see how those systems are running.

and obviously as you make changes in the overhead system, they will be replicated on the screens that you see in front of you there. And we've got the flap handle pretty simple, set flat positions and we'll look at a couple of the resolvers that are used to control these triple redundant device is that are an absolute beautiful piece of manufacturing. the full throttles, the speed brakes or the spoilers as they're known engine cutoff switches and there's also little red lights in these as well in case you get an engine fire as well. And Radiohead's we've got one of those too.

have a look at inside as well. You know all sorts of other little things. The this particular panel here. the crew call panel which is connected to the telephone system that uses a serial Rs-232 serial interface.

Really, yeah, so all sorts of things. These particular units here. They use an SPI like serial interface where you clock the data in a clock, the data route. It's absolutely fantastic if you had an engineering or a electrical diagram of it.

When you have to reverse engineer that stuff, it's it's fun. Rudder pedals are still sitting down there. We're yet to physically hook the controls up to the Synchro systems, and again, that's sort of one of the later jobs that we'll be doing as we'll look at Synchros. They're an absolute fantastic zero noise device.

We've got those running in a couple of the other simulators as well as the resolves in the throttles and the repeatability you get between opening and closing the throttles that will come back to the same point one degree every single time with no noise. so you know, as opposed to pots, which could be anywhere within the realm of five or six graduations. So that's how they. That's how they function.

So how many places did you have to source all these different modules from? I mean adage, Every wait you've got seats from somewhere. You got all the these panels down here from somewhere we've We've got a couple of contact who have some hangers over in the US Arrow Diet Solutions is one of them and they specialize in finding stuff so they're like a broker. They're good, they're in close with the with the disassemblers and they go in and they'll get stuff and you know. Also, they're trusted enough to be allowed to go in and get the stuff themselves because there again it costs more for the for the therefore the wrecker to pull these parts some of these parts out and then it does to cut them up, scrap them, melt them down and I don't have to worry about it.

So if they've got a few approved brokers who are authorized to go into the flames, absolutely yeah. And one of the other group of things is many people buy cockpits. They also buy these panels. But the one thing they don't buy other connectors.

Why is that? Because they don't think about them. And then if you have to buy the connectors because there's so many combinations, you know each 14 pin connector. Oh, and the key? Different. There's six different key combinations so it can become quite difficult to then go and say, and you can't ringing one of these aircrafts disassemblers up and say, yeah, yeah, like 15s end too hard.

Yeah or yeah, 2,000 bucks for one? Yeah, then they'll go find one for you and then they'll probably send you the wrong one. But there you go. Yeah. Some of the other little things.

these things up here. They're the terminals for the heaters inside the windshield. Little while their original 90 kilos, they came separately. Yep, 90 kilo windows.

These ones windows. Yeah, they they did a bulky important Oh Whew Guys got together. I Think they bought four or five of these pair sets of these inside windows. Seats? Absolutely.

Yeah, There's a warehouse of the way from here that's got a staircase in it from a 747, some some used business class seats. There's all sorts of things. It's a big market for the second-hand seats as well. What's that missing? That's the whiskey Compass.

Yep. So what's going in there? We? You'll be out. You'll drive that. Yep, we'll use some old fell fashion technology.

An air core motor to drive that air core motor is a it's used in the speedo of your car and it has a sine and a cosine coil and a fixed I think it's a permanent magnet and a sine and cosine coil and by varying the voltage that you send to each coil, you will actually set the shaft at a specific place in its 360 degree motion. Problem with using a stepper motor is the stepper motor doesn't know where zero is. so then you have to have some sort of a zero. Yeah, absolutely yeah.

So with these air core motors, you send it a specific sine and cosine value and bang. It sets it to that absolute reference. Every single time. every single controlling gear is going back to your system and the simulator software and is going to work.

Absolutely. Even the even the circuit breakers have a circuit breakers. They don't pop automatically. Yeah.

But if you pull the circuit breaker manually, it's reflected in the software and it will. It will fail the appropriate system for you. Although when you guys are flying, can somebody outside? Absolutely? If you have a look at this screen here. Yeah! and if I pull that circuit breaker, the screen goes off.

Oh yeah. and if I push that circuit breaker in in about 16 seconds, give or take, the screen will actually turn back on again. And that 16 seconds is the amount of time that this does. This unit in the aircraft takes to boot, right? Yep, yep and screens back again.

Yes, Yeah. Generally the rule is you only reset a circuit breaker once. Okay, if you reset it at all because usually it's blind for a reason. Yes.

and and the last thing you want to do is sit there and hold the circuit breaker in to stop it coming out again. Not recommended. Not recommended at all in any sort of circuit breaker. Yeah, what else are you going to install in here like I'm screen.

Are you gonna install like I'm You know. screens visual screen like I know you've got one control screen down here, which is the simulator that's the software running. Yep, that's probably the only one we use. We might move.

make that a bit small and move it to an iPad size so that's a little bit easier to get around. Some of the other funky things in here: This is a 10 turn pot. What resolution are you sampling the 10 turn One of these I forget which one it is I Think it's this one. We're only a thousand and twenty four steps because it's all we need.

Only a thousand and twenty four. and this one I think we're up to 65,000 Is that because you need? That's because we need. that level of So that's the fuel to remain to remain. So yeah, Because when you're tilling with 150 tons of fuel, and if you were because this is you, obviously it's not.

It's more than 150 tons, but you can. The idea is when you want to dump fuel, you'll You'll set the system in the appropriate mode and then you'll actually dial up the amount of fuel and it appears on one of the screens here. And you dial that amount of fuel up and then you engage the pumps and it will start dumping the fuel overboard. When it reaches that figure, it'll automatically shut off, and of course, guarded switches so you can't accidentally.

Yep, and some of the other switches. These ones here. for instance, they'll lock wired shut normally. Oh, so in order, it's a real.

It's a real conscious effort to break the lock wire, open the guard up. you have to push the switch, and in those four cases, they are the generator drive disconnect. Oh, absolutely. You just pull.

You can pull them open, you pull away. the wire will break. but at least you can see if the wires been broken. And that's one of the things that you know.

Depending upon how many of those wires are broken, which airline you're working for, you may not be able to depart if a lock wire is broken, of course. Yep. and those generator drives can only be reset back on the ground. Oh okay, yeah, that's it.

So when you pull it, you're gonna have a way to push that. I should say you're gonna have a pretty good reason to push this. So in theory, the pilot could disable all four, generate absolutely, and then you've got no parallel. Although you know, just on the battery because the APU won't start in flight because the APU is actually a little propeller that drops down.

Isn't it? No, that's the rat. That's the Ram Air turbine. Okay, and the 747-400 didn't have a rat, right? The 800 does have a rat now. The 747s obviously got the APU way back in the tail, which is a V jet engine and that supplies air and electricity to run the aircraft.

Lost. It's on the ground, you can take off with it still running, but you can't restart it in the air. So twin-engine aircraft 767, Triple sevens all those you can. It obviously has certain ceilings that it can operate at, but for the 747, they figured quadruple redundancy should be enough for most circumstances.

So so with the twin-engine ones, you would if you had to reached up and you drop to a did the ceiling. Yeah, the systems will tell you what what altitude you have to come down to to start this. There's books, there's yeah, yep, all sorts of things. This strange little strange little black circle here is the cockpit area microphone Oh which is used by the cockpit voice recorder to record what goes on in the flight deck on the directional mic.

The pilots all have a mic as well on their headset. So the CVR has got multiple tracks and this is one of the tracks the headsets are on obviously on Am on on other tracks as well so they can say no. And we have some other non-standard items in here. the emergency stop buttons.

Oh yes. so for the motion platform Yeah so if it goes into meltdown we can push the button to which will cause the pump to shut off Previous absolutely absolutely crashed out on us and my cameras to my tripods Went flying Dave Went flying. it was quite impressive. Yep, and so some other you know tiny quirks of this here craft: the landing gear lever.

so this entire housing actually comes out and is about a depth goes to back to a depth of about this far. And would you believe that the entire housing only has one micro switch in it? originally because the whole landing gear system is connected to a big shaft, the big wheel and all sorts of cables. and you don't need microscope. Just when you got all those cable you don't need a sensor? No right.

But what we were able to do is we discovered that the that the plate that holds the one micro switch actually had holes drilled for another two micro switches and we found the off-the-shelf components for the switches, found some screws, mounted them in, wired them up, use the same connector. Off we went and so there we go. And we talked about electromechanical. I Can't put the gear up because we're on the ground and you know if we're in the aircraft.

After we take off this lever, this button retract which will allow us to put the gear up. There we go. And yep, it's a big positive action that you know that you're moving the gear. Absolutely Yeah, Absolutely one of these.

NAS Push-to-talk Is that? Yeah, A push-to-talk panel. The clock button. The clock button will actually cause the clock to start. Yes, Have a look, have a look at the clock.

There we go. And if we stop the clock and reset the clock, Stop it. reset it. Start it again.

Now the clock doesn't talk to anything. The clock doesn't do anything. That's just a clock. Yeah, yeah.

you can set the time, you can set the date, and depending upon the airline and the procedures, some airlines use those clocks to ensure that the engines have the appropriate warmup time if you encounter an emergency. one of the first things you do is you restart your clock and you know if you have a fire, a fire warning, if it's still there in 30 seconds then you. you need to do something about that. So it's a timeout place? Absolutely Yeah, time failures and other features.

You know we've got to land. Or so would you do that? Maybe not because you've got the eye. Then you've got the flight computer to do absolutely all of the information and data that's in there. Makes the pilots job much much easier.

In this day and age, where's the printer is in there? At this stage, we've not installed the printer. Oh look, we have it. It's sitting on the workbench, but there's this. Just a lot of work into.

Derek Forty Nine. Sorry, it's not a Forty Nine. It's an Airing Seven Four Zero protocol and we need to develop an extra add-on board to deal with the amount of memory that it requires because of the way you have to send the data and the amount of data that it requires. We need an SPI memory chip, and so it's not.

just absolutely. yep. Yep, Not a simple straightforward thing. Other cool things: This autobrake switch.

here. It's spring-loaded in a couple of positions and when you're on the ground and the the inertial navigation system is running so that the aircraft knows where it is and how fast it's going, when you turn it to RTO it will actually latch there magnetically. Yep, Yep. So there's a solenoid on that latches that then when you take off, when the wheels lift off, it'll spring to off position.

And likewise, then when you're in flight and you're coming up to where you're going to land, you think, okay, I'm going to need to set an auto brake setting. So you push it down, you turn it to the disarm position, and then you would set the amount of auto brakes you require and again, the solenoid would hold it there. As soon as you touch the brakes on the ground, it clicks off and goes into the disarm mode. So again, the mechanical spring-loaded mechanisms that go to make these things work.

It's um, it's pretty cool just to sit there and play with working on this project. This particular one. I think we've been actively working on it probably about three years. Three years.

and no, no, no, this is. we come in now. This is a bit of our development platform. so one of the first ones that we started work on.

we've taken a lot of these panels back to our workshop. We've looked at the logic behind them and you know, sort of I was coming out here anytime, any frequency from once a week to to once a month at one stage doing a little bit of work. obviously Matt wanted to do a little lot of work in here, so all of the panels have been reconditioned. They've been refinished, all the dents and dings and scrapes have been removed.

Matt is the owner and so as I said. so we've been working on it for that amount of time. A lot of the work has already been done and we had a sort of a big spurt of work where you literally just pull all the pieces together like a big Lego puzzle and it went from nothing to having all the panels in in the space of about two weeks. So I think the circuit breaker panels, which is probably one of the most useless things in the in the simulator.

They were the first things we wired up right? Actually, that panel down there was the first ones that we were headed up. which yeah, and unless the the guy in the back seat gets really bored, you're not likely to use these. These are all your cable looms up here. the black PDT braids.

Yes, there are cable looms and they run down the side wall and to all of these same stack boards that you saw earlier sitting in the in the back corner of the simulator. Likewise, this bought more boards out the front and we're about to start wiring up the Center pedestal stuff and that will go to a location under the floor where we've got some power suppliers and some din rails all ready to go. Our goal is we want this on the platform by June next year to give us a few good months of testing and shakedown before we have. Well flight in November next year and being the 20th anniversary of World Flight, we kind of want to do some.

You want something real? Yeah, absolutely. So we want it to be pretty big. Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. we want, we want to move.

But for a while we had the best simulator because we had the only simulator. Some people have beaten us a little bit, but nobody has got anything with this level of fidelity and this level of realism, especially on a motion platform, especially in the DIY zone. We've had several and the challenge is to actually get them to come in. Yeah you know cuz most of them it's their job and they don't want to be anywhere near a terror plane after that.

But a lot of them have come in and they will argue amongst themselves and how real how realistic it feels. Some of us say that's too loose and we'll say that's too tight someone. so that's just perfect and you haven't touched anything. Yeah, so it's like that.

it's you don't they say about opinions like this whole copy will be lifted like ten meters to thee. So you lift the other one off. Get it, be coy, still lift the other one off. Then we want to do some made major maintenance work on the platform itself and we want to take some weight off the platform.

We also want to overhaul the hydraulics because there desperately needs an overhaul. A lot of the fittings and things are starting to we. oh absolutely yeah. and it's a long time.

it's been running here for it's been running here for more than ten years. It was in storage for ten years before that, so it's in need of some maintenance and some TLC which will also let us understand quite how this is going to fit on that platform as well because as you saw, we've got a couple of things that poke through the floor and we can't easily chop those off. especially when one of them's the aileron sensor that would make a that would be a real mess of that. Yeah, so yeah, so that'll sort of end up going on there.

As I said, we're probably talking to June next year as one will get it on. and yeah, hopefully it all goes swimmingly and we've got no problems. And you even link the rudder pedal brakes with the brake lever over here. Absolutely.

So if I can just maneuver myself around here, find the right button yep and we'll jump onto the brakes and we'll push the brake pedals in and lift the brake lever up. Let the brakes go and they stay there. It's a mechanical link so it actually latches onto the braking mechanism. Now if I push the toad breaks down again, the lever drops and let the brakes go And theoretically we can taxi.

Excellent! Yeah, that's brilliant. I Like a test. it feels pretty realistic when you're in the motion simulator, but we've done a whole I will link in the video I've done whole video. talking about how realistic it is in flight and feeling and how some areas it's not so realistic as well.

So but this one is, this one's going to be pretty awesome I Think Yep, once we get it finished. How with this compared to a Boeing one? Do you know? have you been inside I've been inside some real Boeing ones? And the big difference is they use a collimated display. A collimator display is effectively a display focused on infinity. and it uses a mirror and a rear projection system.

So you'll have a rear projection screen above the cockpit and directly in front of you you will have a convex mylar mirror. Oh, and the mites? Oh yeah, and so yeah, it's 27 feet or something like that is the magic number and so from your eye you focus on the mirror, which is actually a projection that's coming from above the cockpit. and that's why all the big symbols you see have this dome out the front. Yes! and there's a vacuum in there and that's how they get.

That's how they get the mylar. They vacuum the mylar, which causes it to have an absolute perfect image and perfect reflection during operation. Yeah, and that's why you're gonna pay up which is 750 thousand US dollars for a collimated display system from Moderns. Just the display system.

so your display is gonna stay the same. Yeah, it'll basically just we project onto that with three or four projectors. we haven't decided how many we'll use and a computer with you know, lots of grunt and lots of video cards and and off we go see if we can get 4k projectors. and the good thing about that instead of because some homemade simulators will have the just dumb LCDs in the windows won't they? and then that's not as what.

You can't move your head and look around the pillar there for example. One of the big issues we do have and a few people commented on this in the last video is that because prepared flight simulator was designed for desktop use when you set it up in a big screen wraparound screen like this, generally only one seat will have the correct view and that will be the pilots view. All other seats will have a parallax offset error of some description which is why from the copilot seat it looks like you're about to land on the grass, but from the pilot's seat you looks like you're gonna land on the runway. Interesting.

Wow So it's all about eye position and eye height and all that sort of stuff and there are some systems that trying to overcome that we compensate that it makes a big difference. Yep, yeah, and because your tripod was set up on the copilot side, that's right. I Noticed that it was kind of out offered an angle and I thought oh that doesn't quite my I thought he's not mind up on that runway. Oh look.

John will be the first to admit that he can't land. Absolutely. Wow So you pump air into here to keep it? Yep, Yep. so we've got some cooling systems going.

I Think we're going to need to up the up the ante on those and get some proper pressurized cools bowls. If you put your finger on them, you can actually feel the heat. Go and dive. Do it.

You go and dive. Do it. Each one's eight watts, right? Each one's eight watts. That one.

I can hide? Yeah. Boni Thirty. Okay, yep, that's how it's so. they get into 50 degrees and above.

Yep, just those. Yeah, each bulb is like eight eight watts, right? Yeah. I Think it's something like a what? Yes, Yeah. but you want the realism? Absolutely yeah.

Now if you were to turn your lights down a little and we'll see if we can get some an appreciation of the backlighting as well, there we go. Now you have to forgive us. We've got a couple of we've got a lot of bulbs out here, so there's a bulb out in that one in that one. We're missing a nameplate off the front of that one, but if we do some other things, we've got the master test function which basically turns everything right.

all we all the circuit breakers as well or the circuit breakers are there permanently looked And we've got the dimming control. Z Do you mean control? Yeah, yeah, which allows us to dim those and brighten those up and down. Yeah. Wow And their bulbs under the under the heading, altitude and heading display as well? Absolutely.

They're all incandescent bulbs and some of the other things we can do is singing. Yep, simulator software is running. So what we've done here is we've just turned most of the power out. Yeah, and you'll notice that the backlighting is only working in one, two, three four panels.

right? And that's the way the aircraft is designed and the backlighting is only working at 50 percent brightness. So the control here does absolutely nothing to change the brightness of those panels. Yeah, until I Start to bring the buses online. So if I bring the first bus online you get, you get the proper brightness.

We get the 400 Hertz whine going on there and in one of the panel's overhead there. you'll actually also get a split system breaker that chooses to open and close at certain times as well. Wow And there we go. Really? And I can attest even the old one, It felt like you were in the real yeah aircraft coffee and it was just this one's going to be even.

Absolutely, it's gonna be fantastic. Yeah, Yep. so we can't wait to get it all finished and uh and get it on on the platform and go for a fly. No worries and your you might drop by the lab one time with some secret.

I'll drop by the lab with some secrets and some resolvers and a couple of our ink can and we can have a look at some of the some of the guts of those and do a bit of a bit of a teardown. Thanks, right? And I'll link down our simulated solutions down below. Fantastic because you'll If someone's got the money, you'll make him a simulator. Absolutely.

Planes Trains Automobiles, Racing cars. you name it, we do it. So will you do it? from like it? you do everything or just the controls it so we do the input output solution. We've also got some really good partners that we work with which are fantastic with motion platforms with the engineering side.

Absolute. We've organized turnkey solutions before being part of many projects. We even work with companies who are designing and building their own aeroplanes and building simulators for them so that they they can train the pilot. Oh no, we're talking military trainers as well.

Yeah, Yes! I Love to work with an F1 team. That would be awesome! Absolutely love to work with Absolute Proof our crap. I Have at it, but you know we'll see how we go. Thanks No worries Dave.