Quote:
Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz
I agree with Hulk on this one.
I've seen a few shows on the development of the A380 and they had some pretty advanced simulators to start training pilots on well before the thing got off the ground. Of course it isn't going to be 100% accurate, but they can come pretty close.
I'm sure this plane would be no different. Those pilots probably have hundreds of hours on the simulator well before they get into the real cockpit.
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For sure - I almost fell out of my chair when I read the original suggestion that they need the test pilots to create the simulator model. There is an incredible amount of software and wind tunnel work that goes on developing an aircraft like this. They know exactly what that wing is going to do in the air. Test pilots are important for testing the edges of the flight envelope - the outer edges of the flight envelope are harder to model accurately, and that's where even well designed aircraft turn out to have quirks and issues that you didn't anticipate.
If you are at all interested in aviation and aircraft engineering, you should check out X-Plane on the PC or Mac. Rather than use a table of performance info like MS Flight Sim does, it uses something called Blade Element theory to slice all the surfaces of the aircraft up into their individual aerodynamic components, and then simulates air flow over them. (check it out here:
http://x-plane.com/pg_Inside_X-Plane.html). As a result, you can design all kinds of planes, with all kinds of wings, and get a pretty fair representation of how it affects the performance of the aircraft. I have used it, for example, to test the change in performance on an R/C aircraft using a clipped (shortened) wing. It's obviously not as detailed modeling as Boeing has (your PC isn't a supercomputing cluster...), but it gives you a good idea of how much modeling can be done.