Flight simulator fans revive a classic Boeing 747 cockpit

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How far would you take your flight simulation hobby? Perhaps some extra screens? Maybe some custom controllers? Or would you go as far as to revive a scrapped Boeing 747 cockpit to satisfy your simulation needs?

In the heart of Silicon Valley, a dedicated group of enthusiasts is reviving the cockpit of a scrapped Boeing 747 to take part in the WorldFlight event.

WorldFlight has teams that operate high-fidelity cockpit simulators in a week-long virtual circumnavigation of the planet. The Jurassic Jets Team intends to take a simulated Boeing 747-200 for its virtual journey.

The flight simulation software behind the scenes is X-Plane, and some of the enthusiasts behind the project spoke to the company about the ins and outs of using a cockpit removed from a retired 747 as inputs and outputs for the flight simulation software.

Taking the impressive Felis 747-200 model as a starting point, the team needed a donor cockpit and selected a former Japan Airlines Boeing 747-300, which had ended its flying days more than a decade ago, and was sent for breaking in 2022.

One of the group, Kyle, explained the choice to X-Plane: "Our (donor) cockpit is actually from a 747-300, but the differences between the -200 and -300 are minimal." (The photo associated with this story is a 747-206).

"The 747 classic is not just the Queen-of-the-skies, it’s the original Queen. No fancy glass displays, no FMS, no advanced systems. It's old school jet age flying and has a lot more depth in systems and operations than a newer jet which keeps things exciting. Having a 3 person crew is great just because it's so unique these days and it makes the CRM [Crew Resource Management] aspect more important."

Following the team on WorldFlight will undoubtedly be an education compared to simulations of modern aircraft, which tend to operate with a two-person crew.

The team had some experience, having created a wooden replica the previous year. But the idea of taking the real thing and building it into a simulator proved too tempting to resist.

To get it up and running required a colossal amount of reverse-engineering. The software exposes enough data points to drive and be driven by the real aircraft instruments and controls, and the team experimented with breadboards, Arduinos, and Raspberry Pi computers, before real PCBs were designed and fabricated.

Kyle explained to the X-Plane blog that the biggest challenge was the sheer amount of wires involved, including thousands that went nowhere. "Consider that each single switch is two wires, each light is one wire, that right there tallies up to nearly 1000 wires alone ... everything is analog, so we need to do a lot of signal processing just to get it to the point a computer can read it."

While creating high-fidelity cockpits for flight simulators is nothing new, there is something glorious about enthusiasts reviving the cockpit from a long-retired classic Boeing 747. As Kyle noted, it's never as easy as you think it will be, or cost what you expected (both in time and money). But ... "it is also just as cool as it sounds." ®