Ambitious enthusiasts buy entire Boeing 747 cockpit in race to build flight simulator — three-month project recreates gauges, dials, and other mechanical instruments for X-Plane sim

A group of flight sim enthusiasts is building a complete sim rig in their garage using the cockpit of an old 747 jumbo jet. The Jurassic Jets Team, whose members’ backgrounds range from construction, engineering, and aviation, bought the cockpit of an old, decommissioned Boeing 747-300, and they used it as a base to construct an authentic flight simulator for X-Plane. What makes the project more challenging is that the 747-300 cockpit is fully analog, with gauges, dials, and other mechanical instruments that require signal processing for it to understand the data coming from the computer.

The team is rushing to complete the 747 flight simulator in time for WorldFlight 2025 — a one-week, 24/7 charity flight sim event with teams across the world flying from Sydney, Australia, all across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, down to the Antarctic, then finally back to Sydney. This event will feature realistic air traffic control through the VATSIM network, and the Jurassic Jets Team thought that the best way to experience this is through building a sim rig from an actual airplane.

The deciding factor for the team was the release of the Felis 747-200 add-on for X-Plane. This added a highly detailed model of the 747-200 to the flight simulation platform, which was built using original data from Boeing, as well as support from numerous pilots and flight engineers who had flown the jet in real life. From here, they then considered building a sim rig from scratch or using a real airplane as a base — after crunching the numbers and scouring the internet for used parts, the team decided to buy the cockpit from an old Boeing 747-300 and use it for their build.

Since the 747-300 is a pretty old jet, it didn’t have a ‘glass cockpit’, meaning its avionics were composed of analog equipment, and it required a flight engineer to fly. Kyle, one of the team members behind the project, said, “Although our cockpit is actually from a 747-300, the differences between the -200 and -300 are minimal. The 747 classic is not just the Queen of the Skies, it’s the original Queen. No fancy glass displays, no FMS, no advanced systems. It’s old-school jet age flying and has a lot more depth in systems and operations than a newer jet, which keeps things exciting. Having a 3-person crew is great just because it’s so unique these days, and it makes the CRM aspect more important.”

The analog cockpit requires a significant amount of digital signal processing just to function, and it’s not an easy task to get everything right. The Boeing 747 had thousands of wires going through the instruments, and finding the right one for each gauge, dial, and control is a monumental task. Furthermore, since there were no off-the-shelf parts for such an old jet, they had to build it from scratch. Initially, they experimented with breadboards, Raspberry Pis, and Arduinos before finalizing everything on PCBs for fabrication.

More than that, the Jurassic Jets Team is in a race against time as the cockpit only arrived in August of this year. This meant that they only have less than three months to get everything right in time for WorldFlight 2025. You can follow the group as they ‘take off’ in their homebuilt Boeing 747-300 on their Twitch channel, jurassicjets, or you can even fly with them on your own flight simulator by joining WorldFlight.

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