A few armchair pilots have gone far beyond installing Microsoft Flight Simulator on their home PC:
Mr. Krohn’s cockpit is part of a homemade flight simulator that never leaves his home. Yet it has dials, switches and pedals almost exactly like those on a genuine jet plane. The 52-year-old banker has spent more than 15 years building his machine, at a cost of more than $20,000.
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“Mine’s made out of beer cans and truck parts,” says Australian Matt Sheil, who built a 747 jumbo jet cockpit in the garage of his truck-equipment company in Sydney. His simulator runs off 14 computers using 45 programs, some of them custom written. It can bank and pitch, like a real plane. Yet the steering column is an exhaust pipe. “You’d be surprised how many parts a Kenworth truck and a Boeing 747 have in common.”
The real challenge would be to build a full-motion simulator.
For the highest grade of simulators, Level D, the FAA allows transition to a new aircraft type with all the training being done on the sim and the first experience in an actual airplane being a revenue flight (as copilot).