Taking the plunge!

[50fighterfan]

Well, after about a month or so of agonizing about it and flying various different aircraft in MSFS with an eye towards which one would make a good project for home cockpit, I have settled on the Aero L-29 Delfin.

I feel some people who are thinking about starting a project might benefit from a look at my decision process - so here it is...

First, I didn't want to spend the next 10 years or so of my life building this thing. I wanted something reasonably simple to build. Although like many, I like the "'big iron" a full transport type pit is a big undertaking.

Second, at the other end of the scale, I've flown real Cessnas and Pipers. Why build a home cockpit of something I can take a ride over to the airport and fly for real?

Third, whether they will admit it or not, there is a fighter pilot lurking inside of every pilot (real or simulated). If I couldn't build a transport type cockpit (er, excuse me, flight deck) and I didn't want to build a a General Aviation cockpit, I might as well build something that I could never fly in real life (unless a rich uncle I don't know about is in poor health and has included me in his will!) - a fighter, or at least a military type training aircraft.

Ah, but which one! That is where the flight testing comes in!

When deciding which aircraft I would finally base my cockpit on, I set some criteria:

Easy to control! Sure everybody wants to fly an F-104 or an F-15, but try controlling that puppy in a busy traffic pattern while obeying FAA regs regarding airspeed etc! As I do most of my flying online this was an important factor to me. I was more than willing to sacrifice some top end performance to gain some low speed security!

It should be a good "hand flyer"!

The model should be freeware (or shareware). Hey, I'm cheap what can I say?

The aircraft cockpit itself had to be fairly simple and relatively easy to duplicate in home cockpit form. It should be very well documented. There shouldn't be anything in it that makes me scratch my head and say, "What the heck does that do?"

Finally, it would be nice if there were examples still flying today. If some of those examples are operated by civilians (either companies or private owners) so much the better.

In the end I had it narrowed down to either the F-86 Sabre or the L-29 Delfin. I picked the L-29 simply because it was just a little bit "tamer" than the F-86 and, the L-29 is just a tad more "exotic". Admittedly that is a very subjective bit of reasoning, but hey, it worked for me.

Sorry, no pictures so far, but I will post them in the progress area as work progresses.

-George

[Geremy Britton]

Great to have to with us George, looks like you've done some serious planning already. And as you have already done it is important to weigh up the factors to how much you enjoy flying the plane, how it looks, what parts are avialable for it, the cost of building it, how far you want to build, the space you have, and as you quote rightly said which many people forget is there software for the aircraft and what is compatible etc etc.

I'll look forward to hearing more from you George, and of course welcome to the forum. You'll fit right in here.

Best Regards