Going Nowhere

With the holidays right around the corner, many of us are gearing up for a season of traveling to visit family and friends. I think it goes without saying that the best part of this entire time of year is traveling by air. There are the long delays and canceled flights to look forward to, and who can possibly resist being cramped into a tiny seat with no leg room? And just when you think nothing could possibly make your trip any more enjoyable, the passenger in front of you reclines their chair and spills your drink in your lap. Oh, the blissful memories we make during our holiday travels!

Hardware hacker Alex Shakespeare is definitely to be counted among those that love the air travel experience. So much so that he built a flight simulator, just not in the traditional sense of the term. A flight simulator is normally designed to give the experience of flying an airplane, but Shakespeare’s simulator was designed to give the experience of being a passenger on a commercial jet, albeit with a bit more leg room. The Alternative Flight Simulator, as he calls it, is an authentic-looking row of chairs, complete with all of the buttons and amenities you might expect to find on a modern jet, that was constructed inside of his home. Looking out of the window even gives a view of what it looks like to come in for a landing at one of several major airports around the world.

The passenger area was constructed from “a few bits and pieces,” as Shakespeare puts it, that he has collected over the years, which were attached to a custom wooden frame. A computer monitor was positioned immediately outside of the window to display the simulated airport landing videos. A Raspberry Pi Zero is used for playback of these videos, which were collected from YouTube. A control panel taken from the cockpit of an old airplane was placed on the outside of the simulator, and allows the passenger to select which airport they would like to fly into. The Raspberry Pi also controls toggling a fluorescent light, of the sort you would often find on an airplane, on and off.

The customer service panel above the seats has a fan nozzle and light for each of the three seats. Pressing the customer assistance button triggers a light to turn on and a very recognizable “bing-bong” sound — just do not expect that a flight attendant will show up. Perhaps Shakespeare will create a robotic flight attendant in a future revision. Just for fun, there is a special button that plays the Ryanair jingle that one would hear when a plane lands on time. This entire panel is powered by an ESP32 microcontroller.

A person has to have a special place in their heart for air travel to put in all of the work that a simulator like this would take to build. Personally, I will be waiting for a future revision of this project before I decide to build my own. Until the simulator has the ability to lose my luggage, waste my entire day, and nickel-and-dime me for any imaginable minor convenience, it just will not feel like a truly authentic experience.