Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on September 29, 2010 at 2:28pm

Bit like an Airbus then, that is the way of the future I think.

Comment by Curt Olson on September 29, 2010 at 2:34pm

Hi Gary: you get the prize for being observant! Many years ago I got a chance to tag along for some A320 training in a full motion full cockpit simulator at the NATCO in Minneapolis. I got to shoot two approaches from the left seat and the system worked well enough that even I totally greased the second landing, right on the numbers, right on the center line:

http://catalina.flightgear.org/curt/Photos/A320/gallery.html

The flight control system of the airbus really impressed me and stuck in my head all these years, and indeed this is exactly the sort of system I'm trying to mimic (but at a very simplistic level of course.) Unfortunately I'm not as accurate of pilot with my RC airplanes as I am with the real thing (I guess) :-)

Comment by Benjamin on September 30, 2010 at 4:38am

Very nice. Is the source available for study or is it proprietary?

Comment by Curt Olson on September 30, 2010 at 1:11pm

Hi Benjamin, the entire system is not open source, but significant core components of it are. For instance, FlightGear is the glass display engine (shown in the movie.) The flight computer software is largely open source: http://code.google.com/p/microgear/ The flight computer itself is running linux (open-source). The ground station laptop is running linux. The movie was edited together with cinelerra, mencoder, and ffmpeg (all open-source.)

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