Category: News
After successfully completing last year’s edition, Captain Tango and the other pilots of Team JeeHell A320 have happily decided to participate in WorldFlight 2023. This will be our second year joining this week-long event of online flying around the world with ATC coverage while raising money for charity. Once again we will use our four Airbus A320 home cockpits, located in Germany and in Texas, to take turns flying the 48 leg journey around the world.
Captain Tango will be attending FlightSimExpo 2023 in Houston, TX. After joining previous editions in Orlando and Las Vegas, I am sure this will be another wonderful opportunity to connect with the flight sim community and I can’t wait to get there. In addition to meeting other flight sim enthusiasts, I really appreciate interacting with all the vendors and the innovative products they keep bringing to our hobby.
See you at the expo in late June…
In the meantime, here are a few pictures from previous events.
Captain Tango is embarking on a new adventure and will join WorldFlight 2022, a week-long event of online flying around the world with ATC coverage while raising money for charity. This event takes place in early November 2022 and several owners of Airbus A320 cockpits are joining forces to make this adventure possible. Besides their common passion (obsession?) for flight simulation, they also share in common the fact that their simulator uses the same freeware (JeeHell FMGS) for modeling the A320 in great details.
Welcome aboard JeeHell Air…
My heart sank this morning when I heard of the unexpected passing of my friend and fellow sim pilot, Todd Cox. No, actually, my heart stalled when I heard the news.
Todd was a gentleman if ever there was one. He was kind and always willing to help. He was very knowledgeable on many subjects, though always modest, almost minimizing his contributions.
I am honored to have been able to call Todd my friend and I sorely miss him, like so many of us.
The wait is indeed over. The large two crates with all the electronic equipment and structural parts for the cockpit recently got delivered. What an exciting day it was! We couldn’t bring the heavy crates directly into the garage, so we had to open and unpack them in the driveway.
The smaller crate included a lot of boxes stacked up like a very elaborate Tetris game. On the other hand, the larger one only had a few parts, but these were all the big and heavy pieces: rudder pedals, consoles with sidestick and tiller, overhead stand, as well as the sliding table and footrest for the captain side! After opening the crates it took a few hours to just move all the boxes and parts into the garage for temporary storage.
I was up at 6:30 the next day to start taking a full inventory…
After finalizing the overall design and ordering all the equipment in February, the last three months have mostly been a waiting game.
I purchased the cockpit parts and seats from companies in Europe. Based on their size and weight, I decided to have the crates shipped by ocean freight. This typically takes six to eight weeks but is quite cheaper.
The seats, which I ordered from Opencokpits, were able to ship within a few days. The rest of the cockpit elements are supplied by Vier Im Pott and required several weeks for manufacturing. The picture shows the two crates ready to ship at the beginning of May.
On the day of the anniversary of the Miracle on the Hudson, I finalized the plans for my A320 cockpit and placed the order for all major cockpit components. I decided to go with the products offered by Vier Im Pott and chose their open trainer solution as space in the dedicated cockpit room is limited.
I also wanted to keep my current setup so that I can continue flying a variety of aircrafts. To make as much space as possible, I removed the closet doors and tucked in my existing desk cockpit halfway into the closet (yeah, go ahead with the closet jokes…). It will be tight for sure, but I almost see this as a benefit, simulating the cramped environment of real cockpits!
After quite a few iterations, here is the configuration I landed on.
Yesterday was the last day of my 30-year professional career as a research engineer in Belgium, then as a software engineer and applications engineering manager in the US.
This makes today the first day of my “passion” job, full-time developer of flight simulation cockpits. Although this has been a hobby of mine for quite a while already, as you can see from past projects, I look forward to having even more time for new and challenging projects.
In order to better accommodate the space needed to build our next major project, we have decided to move the current cockpit to a new room in the house. It is just across the hall, but required swapping what is currently our guest room with the cockpit room.
This is also an opportunity to take additional pictures of the various cockpit elements built over the year. I certainly intend to use these when documenting our past projects. For now, here is just a quick comparison, before and after the move.
Flight Path Simulation now has a dedicated website (and it looks like you found it). Currently the focus is on putting in place the overall design, adding registration for members to be able to leave comments, and making sure this site is safe and secure.
Starting in early January, the goal is to add more regular content via blog and news posts. We will also populate the Projects page, so make sure to visit it regularly to keep track of our progress. We will document both past projects and our major new project, a full-size Airbus A320 cockpit!
We certainly appreciate your patience as we build this website. I hope you enjoy the content we have to offer so far. Expect many more blog entries and pictures soon.
