Gliding Simulator

This project is over 4 years old after it was started in 1998 and still needs some time to complete (beside a profession career as electrical engineer, project manager in industrial robotics and engineering manager in military flight simulation, there is only so much time to devote on such a pet project.). A lot changed in respect to PC based flight simulation for gliding in the mean time, but still quite a few motivations of 1998 are holding still today. Although the marked brought some good specific gliding simulators, one can see that the MS Flight 2004 still is not really suitable for gliding.

Why another flight simulator?
True, however there are a few considerations about flight sims to take into account:

• Every Sim can be designed optimally for a specific type of aircraft in order to be really convincing.
• The components of a FS differ for applications like military jet, military helicopter, airliner, private airplane, glider, hangglider, parachute, birds. It is obvious from looking at the professional ones for each area.
• Mission specific elements influence the design
• use of standards is not the strong side of common simulators
• MS Flight simulator is quite lousy for gliding, although some extensions came along lately (virtual cockpits, aerosoft VFR sceneries)
• The great open source project FlightGear does not target gliding
• The very good SFS 4.0 came when the project was started already for some time.

Requirements
So what are the reasons for making a new approach, specifically? There are some goals which should be met by the design of the glider simulator which illustrate the decision.

• Glider pilots fly close to the elements, hence the model must be very convincing, especially in situations near the aircaft envelope and side slip manouvers
• The aircraft typical features must be detectable
• Good force feedback for the trim is essential for the feel of flying.
• Interactive cockpit fully functional
• Easy way to freely look out of the window
• VFR navigation and high fidelity at low altitudes: Visual cues for pattern to airfield or outside landing using multiple view ports
• Realistic wheater model
• Special features to support common glider interfaces (VolksLogger, StrePla, GPS..)
• Instructor controls

additionally

• modular approach of using old components for distributed computing in a LAN. Thats cost saving and performance boosting.
• design for a future system platform (power, resources)
• being up to date with newest graphical capabilties.

So, there are products that start to fulfil a few of those requirements. But since noting is perfect yet, there is no reason to stop.