Development and Application of a Reconfigurable Engineering Flight Simulator at Ryerson University

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Flight simulators can recreate aircraft flights for flight training and aircraft design. This paper reviews existing engineering flight simulators and introduces the development of a multi-purpose reconfigurable engineering flight simulator at Ryerson University. The multi-purpose engineering flight simulator named the Ryerson Fixed Base Simulator (RFBS) has been designed and built to teach and initiate research projects in the area of aircraft design, flight simulation, pilot training, and flight data analysis. It consists of three 46 inch high definition screens and six 22 inch touch screen panels to represent the instrument panel, the centre console, and the overhead panels of an actual aircraft flight deck. Several low-cost, commercial flight simulation software were tested and X-Plane was selected as the main flight simulation tool. This paper also introduces a research that utilizes the RFBS and a commercial flight analysis software. The objective of the research was to develop a flight data conversion methodology. A case study was commenced to verify the work flow of flight data generation and analysis with an example of hard-landing analysis.