The NASA Advanced Concepts Flight Simulator - A unique transport aircraft research environment

This paper addresses the current and planned capabilities of the NASA Ames Research Center Advanced Concepts Flight Simulator (ACFS) located at Moffett Field, California. The ACFS is used to study many aspects of human factors in aviation safety as well as methods to improve aviation operational efficiency. The ACFS provides full mission functionality and appears similar to high fidelity training simulators but is unique in that no flight hardware is used; the entire simulation is programmable. This capability allows the simulator to be reconfigured to meet any research requirement. This paper describes the current and planned capabilities of the ACFS, elaborates on some of the unique features available to the aviation research community, and describes some of the specific research programs completed recently as well as some future research plans.