Our First Delivery & Installation

On Friday night, we passed a significant milestone with the delivery and installation of our first production boards in a 747-400 Simulator.

The work took a couple of hours and was relatively straight forward with the hardest part being the tracing out of the existing wiring.

Hard at work finding the wires — Hard at work finding the correct wires

The Foundation Board and one Input Board were connected to the following inputs:

Flaps (Up, 1, 5, 10, 20, 25 & 30)
Fuel Cut off Switches (1, 2, 3 & 4)
Gear Handle (Up, Off & Down)
A/T disconnect switches
TOGA switches
Captain’s Master Caution/Warning button
First Officer’s Master Caution/Warning button
Auto Brakes (RTO, Off, Disarm, 1, 2, 3, 4 & Max)

John sorting out the code — John finalising the code

We also connected up the Captain and First Officer Master Caution and Warning lights. The lights were running on a 24V DC bus and used to be connected up to a couple of relays. By removing the relays and using the Foundation Board we can now dim the lights as part of the MD&T routine.

Roddez performing the installation — Rodney performing the installation

The next tasks are to connect up the throttles, seat belt/no smoking switches and trim switches as well as other miscellaneous cockpit switches. We will also look at powering the auto throttle motors using an H-bridge connected to another Foundation Board, getting the MCP working and re-wiring the Flight Deck Solutions overhead hardware that used to have a SimBoards interface to PS1.