L-1011 Trainer Installation: Integral Instrument Lighting - Glare Shield

L-1011 Trainer Build-Out

Jim Blasco and myself are slowly working our way with the instrument lighting from left to right. Today we started putting cabling in place for the glare shield components. The Lockheed L-1011 glare shield is home to the controls for the Autoflight system as well as the navigation radios. In the image below you can see the initial state of the light plate illumination for the Thrust, Pitch and Heading module as well as a partial light up of the Autopilot/Flight Director engage panel. 

The Micro Fiche that we received from Paul Talbot a few months ago has proven absolutely vital to the project because it has allowed us to attempt to re-create the original L-1011 cabling as close as we can. The APFD System on the L-1011 relies heavily on Synchros ... so getting the AP to work close to the real thing will be an interesting challenge, however, I have been cooking on a rather unconventional synchro solution that I will show you guys at a later point.

L-1011 Glare Shield Lighting

L-1011 Trainer Installation: Glare Shield Replacement

L-1011 Trainer - Glare Shield - Autopilot

The L-1011 trainer that we got from Delta did not come with any real instrumentation. All of the instruments you have been seeing as part of the blog postings are instruments we replaced with real flight hardware used on actual L-1011s. Today, we replaced the last photo mock up on the simulator ... the glare shield autopilot and radio components. In the image below you can see the image that was pasted onto a plate and mounted in place of the autopilot under the glare shield. This has now been replaced with a custom made plate and with the actual control components:

Before

L-1011 Trainer - Original Autopilot Photo Replica

After

The glare shield is not only home to the autopilot components, but also holds the VHF NAV 1 and VHF NAV 2 radio as well as the RADIO/NAV selector for the HSIs, a ENGINE 2 warning light and a FIRE warning light.

L-1011 Glare Shield

L-1011 Autoflight: Two Independet Autopilots (22-6)

The autoflight system contains two independent dual-channel autopilot/flight director computers that are always on and synchronized with the aircraft attitude. An autopilot/flight director system engage panel, located in the center of the pilot's glareshield, is used to engage either a flight director, an autopilot servo or both with the autopilot/flight director computers. The autopilot/flight director system engage panel is effectively divided in half. The left side is for autopilot A and the right side is for autopilot B.

L-1011 General Aircraft Characteristics: Glareshield (25-21)

The glareshield contains the master/fire warning lights and controls for the autopilot/flight director system - including the autothrottle system.

Cockpit Design Study: Main Instrument Panel and Glare Shield

Today, just a quick cockpit design study. Over the next few postings I will start looking in more detail over the main instrument panel. Here are a few pictures of measurements of the MIP and the glare shield of the Lockheed L-1011. This is to give you a better idea of the size of the front section of the cockpit.


The glare-shield top portion is 62" across.