The most expensive game in the West Rand?
The question is, could this incredibly powerful machine accurately replicate the sensation of real flight?
Once the hobby bug has a hold on you, there isn’t much you wouldn’t do to have it all and do it all. Soon, you might find your hobby has turned into an obsession.
Gert de Beer enthusiastically explained how his love for flying started when he was quite young. He started but didn’t finish his flying licence, as he soon realised that he had a greater fascination with flight simulation and all the technical aspects behind that.
“It’s how I relax. I can take a flight in the simulator for 8 hours at a time, and there is always something new,” Gert said as he commenced the startup sequence of a Boeing 747 behind his computer.
This isn’t just any computer. In fact, calling it a computer is an insult to this powerhouse of a flight simulator. Having used multiple flight simulators before, especially after he had a flight in one such simulator at a festival, he knew he needed to do better and make his own.
“The operator at the festival set up everything for the flight beforehand, charged people a lot of money for a 10 minute flight, and told them to fly a short distance and land the plane.” This bothered Gert quite a bit. As he explained it, “What if a kid who really wants to be a pilot one day has this as their first experience? He’ll be completely discouraged.” And, so, he set out to build his own, highly accurate flight simulator in his home.
His hope, in the end, is to bring in children with the dream of flying one day, to provide them with an accurate experience and to teach them, step by step, how to start up a plane, to control every single part of it as a pilot would in real life and to land it safely.
“By the time they’re finished, they would have learned how to do all of the technical things it takes to fly any plane. The only extra thing they’ll need to experience in a real plane is all the feelings associated with flying.”
Gert is a chemical engineer by profession, which sees him travelling around the world on a regular basis for work. A few years ago, he travelled to Wales to visit a big name in the flight simulation world. He spent a few days there, experiencing the culture and learning a lot about private simulation setups from some very serious players in the game.
He came back with just an idea and built a flight simulator which could challenge any other in terms of realism, performance and control accuracy. His setup is run by four high performance computers, and the multiple screens, controls and switchboards accurately represent the mechanisms in the cockpit of any plane.
