Elite Simulation Solutions, manufacturers of the iGate series of flight training devices, has introduced a new personal helicopter simulator in response to customer demand.
The TH-50 is designed to provide an affordable VFR rotary trainer for flying schools and home-users, based on the single-engine turbine Eurocopter AS-350 Squirrel.
The system comes complete with the seat platform with seat, cyclic, collective, anti-torque pedals, hooded instrument monitor with mount, 1650 mm LED TV, GPS and heading bug control module and computer with pre-installed helicopter and visual scenery software.
Students and pilots can use the TH-50 to perform all helicopter manoeuvres from hover, hover taxi, quick stops, confined areas, pinnacle landings and even autorotations. The TH-50 uses Prepar3D visual graphics by Lockheed Martin, which also includes a variety of weather conditions such as rain, snow, reduced visibility, turbulence and thunderstorms in both day and night settings.
Many malfunction capabilities such as loss of tail rotor, loss of tail rotor thrust and instrument partial panel are available as well, but the ability to start and do start-up and shut-down procedures has been removed because Elite believes it makes the operation simpler.
The TH-50 is fully instrumented and includes a GNS 530 WAAS for GPS and VOR navigation and approaches. The heading bug, OBS and radar altimeter are controlled by physical knobs.
An instructor station is also available with the TH-50, which provides instructors the opportunity to supervises student sessions. It includes horizontal, vertical, and extended profile views, an airspeed graph, flight data recorder with VCR-style
playback control, virtual airport facility directory, transponder tag, with squawk code and a heading and altitude read-out.
More information on the new TH-50 is on the Elite website.