Author: Captain Tango
Yesterday was the last day of my 30-year professional career as a research engineer in Belgium, then as a software engineer and applications engineering manager in the US.
This makes today the first day of my “passion” job, full-time developer of flight simulation cockpits. Although this has been a hobby of mine for quite a while already, as you can see from past projects, I look forward to having even more time for new and challenging projects.
A very warm “welcome aboard” from your Captain. I hope you will enjoy our journey together as we prepare for our initial takeoff. Our first destination should be a relatively short hop, mostly documenting my existing cockpit setup, from its original paper design to its current state. The weather has cleared up and it should be a pretty smooth ride. So, come along and enjoy the ride.
After that initial segment, we will be catching our connecting flight to a much farther and even more exciting destination. My next big thing is a project that has been with me for the best of the last 20 years. It started more as a dream, but then crystalized in my head little by little. The time is now! This will be my most ambitious project so far, building a full-size Airbus A320 cockpit.
In order to better accommodate the space needed to build our next major project, we have decided to move the current cockpit to a new room in the house. It is just across the hall, but required swapping what is currently our guest room with the cockpit room.
This is also an opportunity to take additional pictures of the various cockpit elements built over the year. I certainly intend to use these when documenting our past projects. For now, here is just a quick comparison, before and after the move.