PC Based High Quality and Low Cost Flight Simulator

The development of a flight simulator is a challenging work because of its complexity and tremendous cost. We have accomplished a flight simulator composed of PC cluster and non-flight-certified COTS components and have proved its fidelity and coordination characters as a flight training device. The main purpose of this project is to find a low cost solution to man-in-the-loop flight simulation while still accomplishing a competitive high level of quality. This paper describes the architecture of the flight simulator, the software development tools and hardware platform. These software and hardware constituted a PC based simulation environment and made the expense of the simulation application affordable. We also present the simulation modeling process. And for the integrity of the cueing system, we established a virtual prototype of the motion system which should support the cockpit of the simulator. The integrated system gave us a chance to testify the fidelity and coordination of the simulator. The validation method and simulation results are presented finally to show the feasible design based on PC to carry out flight simulation application with high quality and low cost.