OH-SIM in English
OH-SIM in brief
OH-SIM is Malmi Aviation Club‘s (EFHF, located in Finland’s capital city Helsinki) Cessna 172 flight simulator, which has been built into a real Cessna 150 frame. The heart of the simulator is a normal PC and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 with a large amount of different add-ons. The simulator project was started at 2002 when a few club members started to research if it would be possible to build a simulator into a real Cessna’s frame. Since then the club members have made thousands of voluntary workhours while building the simulator. Finally the first official flight with complete simulator was flown on 18.2.2004. Currently the simulator has flown over 1100 hours and most of them online (Vatsim or IVAO).
As real as it gets…
The simulator, OH-SIM has a fully working Garmin GNS530 GPS device and 160 degree visual system. The complete avionics system include everything from altimeter to electric clock and yoke is equipped with electric trim. Pilot and copilot can talk to each other using the intercom and talk to ATC using either pilot’s or copilot’s push-to-talk switch. Simulator fligths are of course planned in the club room where there are aviation charts and weather data available.
After the flight pilot marks flight time and other required data into OH-SIM’s logbook. All flights that have flown appear immediately after arrival to OH-SIM’s virtual logbook, from where flights can be analyzed using either Google Earth or Google Maps. The simulator records its position and height every second into a kml-file which enables to have very detailed debriefings.
Simulator activities
The simulator can be freely used by all club members – so flying the simulator is totally free! Even though the simulator can’t be used for real flight training, flight students and people who already have pilot’s license use OH-SIM for practising. The simulator is a very capable training device for:
- Navigation
- IFR flying
- Search And Rescue practising
- VFR/IFR phraseology
- Emergency situations
- Flight planning
In addition, MIK (Malmi Aviation Club) has organized many simulator events – and most of them are focused on online flying in IVAO or VATSIM networks. For example people can reserve a flight that they will fly from airport A to airport B, and then the second flightcrew will fly the simulator from B to C and so on.
Once in a while we have visiting days open for public when anyone can come to fly a testflight in simulator and meet club members. When all the questions related to simulator have been asked, the most common sentence is: “How do I get my own PPL (Private Pilot License)?” 🙂 The answer is simple, MIK organizes pilot training too 🙂
Technical specification
The main computer:
- Asus P6T SE -ATX LGA1366
- Intel Core i7-930 2,80 GHz
- OCZ Gold 3x2Gb 2000MHz
- Asus ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX480 1536 MB
- Intel X25-M 160GB SATA SSD 2.5″ and WD Caviar Green 1TB SATA II
- Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme audio
Software
- Microsoft Windows 7
- Microsoft Flight Simulator X
- TRC Link – For Simkits Avionics
- FSBUS – For switches, LED’s, 7-segment displays
- SIOC – For switches, GNS530 GPS
- ActiveSky Evolution – For actual and precise weather data
- FS Tracker – For logging simulator position and heigh
- FSUIPC, WIDEFS, GPSOUT
- RealityXP Garmin GNS530W (+Garmin Trainer) – For GNS530
- Online flying softwares: Squawkbox 3 and IVAP + Teamspeak
More about the OH-SIM simulator
- Watch more pictures from OH-SIM gallery
- Watch Youtube videos about simulator
Contact us
via email -> simulaattori at mik dot fi
