L-1011 Trainer Installation: Seat Actuators

L-1011 Captain's Seat - Electric Seat Actuator Control

Here is a short demo of the servo motor driven seat actuators that we recently connected. The actuators drive the captain's as well as the F/O's seat in the vertical as well as the horizontal axis. The horizontal movement moves the seat forward and aft and also swings the seat outboard in the full aft position.

Below is a short video showing the L-1011 cockpit seat actuator action.

Below is an image that shows the power connection into the F/O seat. The cockpit seat assembly simply takes 115V/400Hz power for the motor actuators. Each seat is protected with a 2A fuse.

L-1011 Trainer Installation: Seats and Cockpit Shell

L-1011 Seat Installation

I am finally able to slowly continue work on the L-1011 simulator. Unfortunately, I was not able to raise any contributions for the L-1011 project, and that's alright. The project will go on, just not at the pace I would have loved to move it forward. Today Jim Blasco and myself installed the captain's and first officer's seat into the procedure trainer. We are still short the original second officer's seat, but I hope that over time we will be able to find one.

The image at the beginning of the posting shows the first officer side and the 4" cutout required to place the spring loaded hight adjustment of the seat into the base plate of the procedure trainer. Unlike other aircraft cockpit seats, the L-1011 seats do not require rails. All horizontal movement of the captain's and the first officers's seats is done as an integral part of the seat assembly. The seats are also fully motorized and I will show the motor action in one of the upcoming postings.

L-1011 Cockpit - Capt. and F/O Seats installed.

Of course, as you can see in the image below, the cockpit is still completely open on all sides. To make the simulator feel more cockpit like, we will enclose the cockpit with the actual L-1011 cockpit ceiling and side panels as well as the actual L-1011 cockpit windows.

L-1011 Seats installed and moved to extreme outboard position.

I have also stared planning work for closing in the cockpit with the ceiling panels and windows that we have the L-1011 cockpit. Below is a picture of us trying on some of the ceiling panels and starting the work on building a super structure to hold them and the window panes. 

L-1011 F/O side ceiling panel. 

The aft ceiling panels contain the pilot's overhead speaker. You can see that in the image above and below in the forward part of the panel.

L-1011 F/O side ceiling panel. 

L-1011 Trainer Installation: Cockpit Seat Renovation (Upholstery)

L-1011 Cockpit Seats - First Officer and Captain's

So, when you put airplanes into the desert for long-term storage, you do so to keep them from corroding. However, as a tradeoff, there are some materials in the aircraft that don't take well to longtime exposure to very hot and very dry environments. One such material in particular is the foam inside the cockpit seat cushions. To make matters worse, some of the stored aircraft sit in the desert for along time with no cockpit windows at all which then exposes the seats to full sunlight, dust storms and all kinds of desert nastiness. Clearly our British Airways seats suffered from quite some long exposure to heat and both the bottom and back cushions for the two pilots seats had completely deteriorated. 

Bottom Seat Cushion

Below is an image of one of the bottom seat cushions. The heat more or less backed this naturally pretty firm foam material to a solid brick that has started to crumble apart. You can actually see the foam falling apart in one of the images as if it was coarse sand.

L-1011 Cockpit Seat Foam Deterioration.

L-1011 cockpit Seat Foam Deterioration 

All of the foam used for the cockpit seats has to be removed and replaced with new foam that is close the the original firmness of the cockpit seat foam. To do this we us CF-90 foam which is very nice a firm and frequently used in the automotive industry. It can be very easily cut with a blade or a band saw.

L-1011 Cockpit Seat Restoration - Foam Replacement

Below is an image of the new first officer's seat bottom seat cushion.

L-1011 Cockpit Seat - Foam Replaced

L-1011 Cockpit Seat - Foam Replaced

All of the seat covers have a bit of a bleached look from the long term direct exposure to the sun. I am generally okay with that. The covers have been washed cold several times and, despite the fact they are from 1986 are holding form perfectly.

Back Seat Cushion

The back seat cushions arrived in very rare shape. They had a lot of rot mainly due to the fact that they had been repaired at one point during their life and a slice of the original foam had been laminated together with a somewhat firmer replacement piece using some type of epoxy. Needless to say, you can see in the images below that the back cushion foam had badly badly deteriorated. 

L-1011 Back Seat Cushion Deterioration

L-1011 Back Seat Cushion Deterioration

Trust me, you would not want to sit in this! Besides the great amount of rot on the foam the cushions had also been baked into rock hard boards. So, just like the bottom cushion they are being replaced as part of our renovation effort. The seat backs are sculpted so to give better back support .... hence, getting them into the correct form took some time. However, below are some images of the completed back.

L-1011 Cockpit Seat - Back Cushion

L-1011 Cockpit Seat - Sculpted Back Cushion

Below is the first finished set ready to go back to the museum. We are still on the hunt for the Flight Engineer's seat ... hopefully we will be able to locate one soon.

L-1011 Cockpit Seat Cushions - Restored

Update:

Installed.

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