With these people, who share the same passion with us, it often happens that a business relationship also becomes friendship.
This happened with the commander Oliver Linde who we met over 20 years ago and that we still meet often to have fun with him to transform in reality ideas that many would consider crazy.
In this story, we want to talk about how we collaborated on his last adventure to transform his little dream (not so small) into reality.
When Oliver bought his last jewel, a post-war T28 and took it to the Locarno airport we, but I also think many other friends, took him for crazy!
He wants to refurbish a 70-year-old plane! And not only that, he had in mind to update the avionics adding a new generation of instruments on a cockpit that was already full of hands and switches! This time it seems he was really dreaming…
… then … one day … he comes to us with a millimeter sheet on which he had redesigned the cockpit. He moved some gauges to make space for others and, without neglecting ergonomics, he added everything he wanted.
At least the cockpit could be done! Oliver started immediatly disassembling the cockpit, but when he began to remove the first instruments, the harnesses aged by time showed their fragility and precariousness! Anyone would be discouraged, instead Oliver has found new charge and decided to redo the entire electrical system.
Meanwhile, in Pariani we did a reverse engineering of the original cockpit and made some wooden mock-ups to verify the design and the ergonomics of the new layout.
It took a bit ‘of time to organize all the cockpit at best maintaining the right strength but after few weeks we built the final structural parts for the cockpit NG (New Generation) that in the meantime had evolved further to accommodate some other instrument … in case the ones already included in the first idea were not enough.
The second step was to create new transilluminated panels, in particular the breaker panels that had to be updated to manage the new electronic systems. The entire backlighting of the cockpit has been made using LEDs (Type VII) according to the latest aeronautical standards, for example the SAE AS-7788F.
The third step, no less important and challenging, was to restore the functionality and aesthetics of the most worn original HMIs. The result was beyond expectations, tools from the middle of the last century seemed to have just come out of the factory and did not disfigure at all by the newest MFDs.
Meanwhile, the electrical design team worked on the connections of new electronic instruments such as MFD, GPS, IMU …. To animate the dashboard and make a jump ahead in time of almost a century.
The cockpit could never been so cool!
Now, the Captain Oliver Linde is ready to fly.
Have fun, dear friend!
Stay updated and tuned on his facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/T28BNavy/