Pictures from the Minneapolis Air Force Reserve Base

F-51D Mustang

Doug Wickstrom is a retired USAF Master Sergeant, who now works (having stayed doing the same thing as the company changed name and owner six times under him) to keep the C-130 simulator at the Minneapolis Air Force Reserve Base operational. These are pictures from the day he took me to see his workplace; I'd like to thank him for much help identifying the things portrayed

Pictures from the aircraft collection

McDonnell F-4D Phantom II (top left); Douglas C-47D Dakota (top right); Boeing KC-97 Stratocruiser (above); trainer version of MiG-15bis (below)

Me, with the unmistakable shape of a Lockheed Blackbird (this one is the A-12 CIA model) in the background. I had thought sufficiently few of these were manufactured that it would be unusual to see one, but every aviation museum I've visited in America seems to have been given one as they went out of active service. Poking out behind the Blackbird is the left wing of an F-101B Voodoo; on the other side of me is a Convair F-102A Delta Dart

The Simulator, and its Giant Computer

This is the computer that runs the flight simulator; it's made up of about one hundred and twenty wardrobe-sized cabinets of electronics, comprising three mainframes and a pile of subordinate processors. It dates from about 1982; an era where integrated circuits were available, but today's high levels of integration unthought-of. The logic chips perform ten or so gates worth of computation, the memory chips might hold a few kilobytes.

The top picture in the above table is a single card, the basic unit of the computer. It's about the size of a trade-paperback book, though thinner; it has forty sockets mounted to contain the ICs, and each pin of each IC is led out to a wire-wrap connector; the connections between the ICs are done with blue wire-wrap. This is a 64 kilobyte memory card; about two cents worth of memory at today's prices, though those two cents would buy you about two square millimetres of one chip on a module.

The cards plug into connectors (looking rather like the sockets for ISA PC-expansion cards) in a backplane; the backplane (left and right tall pictures) is the size and shape of a tall, thin book-case. Each shelf (picture below the card) contains 32 cards, and there are five shelves. At the back, connections between the cards within a case are made by wire-wrap, and connections between cases go off on many thick rainbow-coloured ribbon cables.

The power supply is delivered over arc-welding cables; each of those supplies delivers 150 amps at 5V to the Singer-Link Digital Radar Landmass Simulator. The total room-full of electronics draws 480 amps of 208V three-phase AC -- enough to power three hundred contemporary desktop PCs.

And if heavy hydraulics is more interesting to you than heavy computation, these are the legs on which the simulator is mounted (a Singer-Link 6-degree of freedom standard motion base). It's powered by a 150-hp motor pumping 200 gallons per minute at 1350 psi; I'm sorry I can't convey the noise of the compressor in this medium