“25th July 2012, 17:30 local time. The aircraft registered as EC-GND was about to land at runway 10 of La Mancha Airfield. When the aircraft was on the downwind leg informs that they are too high and will make another circuit pattern. When finishing the last one and, noticing that their position was too low, they abort the landing on the runway, touching down outside the airfield. The pilot was unharmed, but the aircraft was severely damaged.”
This story is the start of one of the first projects of the Club: repairing a wrecked Grob G102 Astir CS to make a gliding simulator. Once we inspected the debris, we separated the front section of the fuselage and proceeded to repair the nose of the plane, that had received a strong impact.
Many hours of hard work were needed, sanding and giving shape to the new fibreglass nose, but the result could not have been better.
Once the glider (or what was left of it) recovered its original appearance, it was time for adding the electronics. As this cockpit was not flying again, all the controls should be replaced by sensors capable of detecting the different types of inputs from the pilot, creating an interface with the simulator software. This is how we proceeded to install the potentiometers intended to measure the deflections of the ailerons, elevator and rudder, as well as the use of air brakes. All these signals were sent to the server executing the software. Having finished these tasks, the first stage of the project came to an end.
During the second stage, we will add two electric motors capable of moving the cockpit, improving the realism of the simulator. However, we will have to wait a little bit more to see the final results.
