Author: Markus

Cross the pond 2019 – 🇨🇦 CYYZ-EHAM 🇳🇱

Join us in the bi-annually cross the pond event from Vatsim.

This time I had Chris as a FO with me and we took the 737 from Toronto to Amsterdam. During the 8hours and 9minutes block time we burned 16.1t of fuel. 

Enjoy a mixture of time lapse and real time videos from cockpit preparation until the night landing with different camera angles including Position reports on the NAT Track.

https://youtu.be/77eRWHx3PTY

Our flightplan filed out from FO Chris can be found here:

CTP-AUA364-CYYZ-EHAM-26-Oct-2019-2-Final

Here are some selected screenshots:

parked in Toronto
parked in Toronto
cruising over the atlantic…
… into the sunset
landed in Amsterdam

 

Seatbelts on!

My latest addition to the flightdeck are Seatbelts for the Captains and FO seat. The seatbelts are from cleartosim in Spain. Great contact, provided a lot of info in the pre-sales progress and fast shipping.

Installing them in the correct way was not that complicated.

I removed the back cover and mounted the shoulder part with the already existing bolts of the seat. Some small additions need to be done to the FO seat, as this was my prototype 😉

For the side parts I have drilled new holes and mounted them on the seat.

Looks now better, feels better and a next step to more reality in the flightdeck.

additional flightdeck lights

During my last flights I got asked by an Instagram follower why my flightdeck is so dark when flying in daylight (in the Simulator).

I really never gave a thought on this. But as I started thinking about the question I also had (couple of minutes later) an idea how to solve it.

You have to know that my flightdeck is located in the basement of our house. Therefore its darker, as only one window is installed in the room (it was intended to be dark, as it was planned during house planning and building that the flightdeck will be there).

But to overcome the issue during day flights I have started to install a dim able LED strip on the captains window, below the MIP and on the first officer window. It is regulated via a dimmer manually to match the current scenery daylight.

To get this done some work needed to be done to make sure that the light will not blend in the face. So I attached some painted wooden bars on the MIP structure.

Light Test on Captains side

The LED strips need to be cut and re-soldered to have one strip run throught the whole flightdeck.

To the honest, it look quite good 🙂

Here are 3 comparison pictures.

Lights off
~50% light
full light

 

10 years of Cockpit Building

Today,10 years ago, I finished the work on the first LED lights.

From there – the Overhead in small.

Overhead mockup in small

via this:

Homecockpit v1 from 2010 to 2013

to here – a full size fixed simulator.

Homecockpit v2 – started 2014. Picture from October 2018

During the 10 years of building I learnt a lot, especially that behind of those are always computers and software which can and will always have issues. Broken CPU coolers, crashed HDDs, performance issues with the application, network issues, etc.

But, if all is working as it should be, it all makes huge fun to run such a simulator. In the last 3 years I was more focused on getting things “as real as it gets”. So I invested a lot of my time to record, cut and edit cabin announcements to make them sound good in my setup.

A lot of thanks goes to my father, without him and his knowledge of building and forming wood, it would not be possible. Danke Papa 🙂

I created a short video which takes us through 10 years of cockpit building.

Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/dTVLWPzSiw8

Tiller Maintenance – again

A couple months ago I had to change the potentiometer of the tiller, because is was defect. After a couple of flights I noticed that the steering drags to the left and does not center. So the first impression was that the potentiometer or the input card has an issue. But after some hours of trying to fix it, it got clear that it is a full mechanical issue.

I removed the Tiller handle and during that process the locker mechanism got destroyed… So I had to replace it with a 4mm screw (left).

And on the other side the locking mechanism was not strong enough to hold on to the potentiometer shaft. I removed the screw, drilled a hole in the shaft and reattached the screw, which is now holding the shaft tight.

After some stationary tests I have reassembled it. Now it works perfect and is finally fixed.

Midnight Sun Fly In

During last weekend the Midnight Sun Flyin Event took place in Norway, Sweden and Finland

The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon that occurs in the summer months in places north of the Arctic Circle or south of the Antarctic Circle, when the Sun remains visible at the local midnight.

The term “midnight sun” refers to the consecutive 24-hour periods of sunlight experienced north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle.

I flew from Tromso (Norway) to Kiruna (Sweden). The approach in Kiruna was on runway 03 an RNAV approach.

This video is 90% realtime, only the taxi and cruise are in timelapse.

Sadly the moving map stopped working short after taxi and I didn’t recognized it.

Building a 737-800 Homecockpit [OE-LNJ]