How it started
Henk-Jan’s story starts in the early 80’s. He always wanted to be a fighter pilot. Unfortunately, due to medical reasons, he did not make it through the selection with the Royal Dutch Airforce. This did not cause him to lose interest in aviation. Quite the opposite. Living in the Northeast of the Netherlands, he was lucky enough to live close to a small crop dusting company with it’s own small runway. As a kid he would cycle to the airfield and spent many hours with the pilot to gain his knowledge on all aspects of aviation.
Blocks on a screen to a full 737 cockpit…
His simulator journey also started around that time with subLOGIC flight simulator, which he described as “Blocks on a screen.” The journey developed and slowly but surely, flightsimming and cockpit building would become more and more interesting. Over the years the hardware grew from keyboard, joystick, desk yoke to a full scale B737NG cockpit. 7 years ago, Henk-Jan purchased his ProSim licence. At first, he did not realise the full potential of it. But as he developed his simulator he has used our software at the heart of his simulator ever since…
Challenges
Henk-Jan found that cockpit building was very expensive. As he found that building everything himself was too slow for his liking, he decided to buy his first CPflight panels. Later on he would expand his cockpit by using Sismo Soluciones for his overhead panel.
Cockpit Shell
As the sim progressed, he really wanted a shell. This is an expensive part to buy and because Henk-Jan struggled to build it himself, he asked his brother in law for help. Together they build a shell using drawings from 737 DIY SIM, a fantastic project for anyone who is brave enough to build their own shell. Having the shell around his simulator is the motivation Henk-Jan needed to keep going. “It looks so real now”.
Rocking up some flight hours
Currently, Henk-Jan flies around 6 hours a week in his simulator and has recently made the decision to swap over to Microsoft Flight Simulator. “You can’t really get around it, the visuals are just amazing and the ProSim flight model works really well with it…”
Henk-Jan is a very happy ProSim customer who understands the complexity of our software. We will continue to follow his journey and take his great feedback on board. We hope that Henk-Jan will have many more safe landings in his amazing simulator…
