Microsoft Flight Simulator: More Than Just Entertainment

By Andy Johnston (18 August 2006)

I work as a civilian employee for the Department of National Defence, at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, Canada. (No, that's not a typo. In Canada Defence is spelled with a C instead of an S.)

One missions of the Department is the study of aviation accidents, especially military ones. The way this is done is by studying the data returned by the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) after it has been recovered. The analysis is done mostly using the Insight Suite software from Flightscape.

This software allows for a simple recreation of events from the point of view of the aircraft. However it doesn't recreate other things such as weather and visibility conditions, or the aircraft configuration. That's where Flight Simulator comes in.

Once they have a fairly good idea of what happened, they will use the same model of aircraft (or as close as possible) to fly a similar flight in flight simulator, and record it using the Flight Video option.

Then comes the tough part. All the data in the flight video file gets cleared out, and replaced with the actual figures from the FDR. Now instead of flying a similar path, the aircraft will do the exact same thing in Flight Simulator that the real one did. The problem with doing this is that Flight Simulator requires data input about 18 times a second, the FDR generates its data about once every four seconds. This means that the people involved have to extrapolate what happened in between to try and fill in the blanks.

Once this is done, the correct time of day and weather that was present at the time are set up, and they can let the video run. They will now see the aircraft behaving as the real one did, and will also see the same things out the window. They can even go as far as to determine if the post was in the way and preventing the pilots from being able to see.

They also use a variety of software to recreate the event as much as possible. FSRepaint comes in handy not only to make the exterior look correct, but sometimes also the interior. I was shown an example of a helicopter where if you looked back in the virtual cockpit view, you could see into the back of the aircraft. The rear of the aircraft was empty in the original, so new textures were put together to fill the rear with equipment, as the real aircraft would have appeared.

They also used Custom Panel Designer to try and make the panel as accurate as possible. The drawback was they found CPD didn't meet their needs for working with the virtual cockpits, and were quite pleased when I introduced them to FS Panel Studio.

I got a chance to see up close exactly what they were seeing. Using a set of 3D glasses from eMagin along with the CF-18 from aerialfoundry, I was treated to a fantastic view unlike any I'd seen before.

It just goes to show how versatile the program is. How all these expansion products, both free and payware, have really come into their own.

Although I was told I was welcome to share everything I'd seen, the project is still a work in progress, and so they weren't able to provide me with any visuals or screen shots.

Andy Johnston
andy@andyjohnston.net
http://flightsim.andyjohnston.net

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