A flight simulator is a device that artificially re-creates aircraft flight and various aspects of the flight environment. This includes the equations that govern how aircraft fly, how they react to applications of their controls and other aircraft systems, and how they react to external environmental factors such as air density, turbulence, cloud, precipitation, etc. Flight simulation is used for a variety of reasons, including flight training (mainly of pilots), the design and development of the aircraft itself, and research into aircraft characteristics and control handling qualities.
Depending on their purpose, flight simulations employ various types of hardware, modeling detail and realism. They can range from PC laptop-based models of aircraft systems to simple replica cockpits for familiarisation purposes to more complex cockpit simulations with some working controls and systems to highly detailed cockpit replications with all controls and aircraft systems and wide-field outside-world visual systems, all mounted on six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) motion platforms which move in response to pilot control movements and external aerodynamic factors.
Read more about Flight Simulator: Manufacturers, Instructor Operating Stations, Modern High-end Flight Simulators
Famous quotes containing the word flight:
“Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason’s imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)