L-1011 Trainer: Houston ... We Have Seats!

L-1011 Trainer: First Officer Seat

Houston ... we have seats! Thanks to a very very generous contribution by Capt. Chuck Maire we now have the Captain's Seat, the  First Officer's Seat and one of the two Observer seats. Thank You Chuck! Also, the seats are awesome! They are ex British Airways and will fit the L-1011 Trainer perfectly.

The seats are rather large devices and consist of a pedestal, motors, the actual seats, armrests and lots of other good things. They came packaged to the museum in a pretty large shipping crate.

L-1011 Cockpit Seats - Delivery

Doug Sroggings did a great job packing the seats up and we also got some of the additional cockpit wall and ceiling panels that we are missing to enclose the Trainer.

L-1011 Cockpit Seats - together with Ceiling Panels

The aircraft sat in the desert for quite a long time before being scrapped just recently, so, the seats are pretty dirty. After we unpacked them we started cleaning them and over the next few days we will slowly start cleaning the seat cover fabric.

L-1011 Trainer - Captain's Seat

L-1011 Trainer - First Officer's Seat

L-1011 Trainer - Cockpit Seats

Now they need to be cleaned!

I think that as a sim builder you can probably appreciate just how difficult it can be to the get the right seats for your cockpit project, so, we are very thankful for having found this pair. Also, of course now the hunt has started for the Flight Station (FE) seat and the rails that go with it. 

Below are some shots that show the details of the motors that allow motorized adjustment of the seat position. All positions can also be adjusted manually.

L-1011 Cockpit Seat - Horizontal Motor  Drives

L-1011 Cockpit Seat - Vertical Motor Drive

Just to get a better idea of the installation effort we placed one of the seats into the trainer to get a better feeling for the opening we need to cut into the simulator floor for the vertical adjustment post that extends beyond the pedestal base.

L-1011 First Officer Seat - Test Placement

L-1011 First Officer Seat - Test Placement