Experience virtual flying made real in this impressive flight simulator at Mildenhall! It’s destination Suffolk for a session with the sim2do team learning how to get a Boeing 737 off the ground (and back again) safely and without incident. Are you as a rookie airline pilot up for this aerial challenge?
It might be a simulated world but outside you’re just on the edge of the famous RAF Mildenhall serving as a USAF base until 2020. And that’s where the expertise of this family-run flight sim in Suffolk comes in. All members of the team have many many years’ experience behind them in the RAF with roles such as ground electronics avionics engineer on Mirage fighter jets and Impala jet electrical engineer. Indeed after serving all over the world it’s the highly skilled members of this Mockford family who put in more than 10 000 man hours to create their first Sim2do simulator based on a ex British Airways/Pacific Airlines actual Boeing 737 cockpit.
And this Mildenhall centre has expanded with a brand new static or fixed base simulator based on a Boeing 737-800NG. Purchased from Europe’s largest pilot training school this is about as real as it can possibly get. A combination of incredible graphics and an impressive sound system with no delay and no lag means that you hear everything just as it would be on the flight deck – and with all the switches and levers lit-up and working as they should be you will feel every vibration too – without actually leaving the tranquility of Suffolk at any point!
What we love about these sim sessions is that they are in-depth and comprehensive. With several pre-flight briefing ‘pods’ at the centre it’s a quiet area where you’ll have a full 30 minute briefing on instrument familiarisation. Now not every sim operator does this but they do here at Mildenhall as the idea is that you are as autonomous as possible once ‘airside’ and sitting in that pilot seat. That’s to say your co-pilot will assist with things like fuel pumps and electrical power but it’s you who will start up the engines and take it from there. And as much as possible you’ll be flying in manual mode rather than on autopilot.
With a highly professional set up (where there’s not a mouse or a keyboard in sight as the software is so brilliantly integrated) you will really feel totally immersed in your session in this flight simulator at Mildenhall. With 30 or 60 minutes in the air and over 24 0000 airports worldwide to choose from you’ll soon be getting into full-on airline pilot mode… ‘Good morning this is your Captain speaking’!
