New motion platform vendor

Hi everyone,

I was at the Sun-n-Fun airshow in Florida this week and spent some time flying a new full motion sim being offered by a startup company. They are developing a full cockpit with a six-screen visual display, interchangeable instrument panels and controls for single or twin piston engine aircraft. It is based on FSX with some custom coding to run the motion platform. It has 50 degrees of pitch range, 40 degrees of roll and 60 degrees of yaw. It is being targeted at flight schools with a target price of around $50000 USD.

I flew it for about 30 minutes and the motion was impressive. I spent some time talking with the CEO and tried to convince him that there is probably an even larger market for this product out in the sim community. The development team members are mainly former Dell employees and they are based in Austin, TX.

When I mentioned I might want to use it with my B737-NG sim setup, they said they might offer a stripped-down version for less money.

For those interested, the website is http://www.redbirdflight.com

I have no association with the company, I just thought it might be interesting to sim builders. I wish I had space for this in my apartment.

Peter

Have you video clip? It look great.

I whipped out my camera to take some pictures, and the vendor asked me not to because all of the guts of the machine was still exposed and they are worried about people trying to reverse engineer their solution. So I respected the vendor's wishes. If you email them they might have a video they can share.

I encouraged them to bring their booth to FSWeekend 2008.