Rock 'n Roll (The motion flight simulator)

In the past few months, and for the foreseeable future during my time as a student, I have been involved with the Cal Poly Flight Simulation Group. The flight sim lab is the only known student built, programmed, and run facility in the US. The past Friday and Saturday, during Cal Poly's Open House, we opened our doors to the general public to see and fly the unique simulator.

The Motion Sim
This group maintains a motion flight sim built using the cab of a student built RV-7. The cab is mounted to a motion platform that provides 25+/- degrees of pitch and roll. The simulation was programmed by students using Matlab/Simulink and C++, and outputs the flight data to X-Plane 8, used as the sim's graphics. Inside the enclosed cab the is one monitor to display the flight sim and a second monitor to act as a GPS moving map. Instrumentation is provided by a panel of standard analog readouts, including heading, altitude, attitude, and airspeed. Control of the simulator is currently only provided by a $20 off-the-shelf joystick, but we will soon integrate the aircraft's actual stick and rudder system (The cab was built with the original intention of actually flying).

Open House
On Friday and Saturday, we provided tours of our facilities and allowed anyone willing and able to fly the motion sim. Along with giving a brief talk and answering questions about the sim, I sat right seat with some of the "pilots." As the safety pilot I coached the pilots into making trafficpatterns around our local airport and attempting a landing. This experience got me thinking, "I could see myself as a CFI, as long a the students have a little more serious view of crashing."