Drone controlled real live flight simulator

Abstract

Flight simulator has been used to train pilots for more than 80 years, whether to fly military aircrafts, passenger aircrafts, or even private aircrafts. A flight simulator is a flying cockpit installed on the ground to help training pilots in flying real aircrafts in a low risk and cost-effective way. Nevertheless, all the previous simulators are dependent on a program being installed in combination with special hardware. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to design a ground-based flight training simulator. This simulator depends on a drone to transfer the flying environment in real-time to the trainee. A prototype of the project has been implemented based on a small drone equipped with a MPU6050 piezoelectric gyroscope, laptop, and Arduino since the building of the final shape of the simulator is relatively expensive. Satisfying results are gained and the prototype can transfer the drone movement to the ground simulator giving the trainee the feeling as in a real aircraft, improving the trainee’s capabilities of having real-time decisions over the flying environment. The main contribution of this study is the improvement of the current flight simulators by cloning the real environmental effects to the highest possible levels especially for the training purpose of the new pilots or the rehabilitation of pilots with long out-of-service periods.