Home flight simulators can range from a simple desktop-mounted joystick in front of a laptop, to entire cockpits that resemble the real aircraft. Step 2: What is Your Budget?īefore diving into the practical side of building your own home flight simulator, let’s first think about the numbers. In this guide, we will focus on the latter, as most of our readers are either licensed or student pilots, who want to use their home flight simulator not only for fun, but also to train and improve their skills. On the other hand, you have people like us, (student) pilots, who want to take maximum advantage of their time before and between flights to train procedures, navigation, or other skills, and which saves them tons of money in fuel and renting costs. These enthusiasts might be young kids, flying on their home computer with just a joystick and headphones, or they might be older people with larger budgets who recreated an entire B737 cockpit in there garage, beating many flight school simulator setups. You have the aviation enthusiast who just wants to experience the joys of flying virtually for fun. People build home cockpits for all sorts of reasons. Who hasn’t considered building his own airplane cockpit in the garage yet? In this step-by-step guide, we’ll discuss how to build a home flight simulator, be it for flight training or just for fun.įirst of all, it’s important to make up your mind about your goals, before we start thinking about budgets, gear, software and setups, as this will all depend on what exactly you want to achieve with your home aircraft simulator.

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