The Primary Flight Display PFD is loosely based on a modern aircraft instrument and is added to the MDF automatically near planetary surfaces e.g. when descending on a planet in Elite Dangerous or when hooning around in Fly Dangerous.

Not a pilot

Far from it. In fact I don’t even enjoy “real” flying. Aviation does have a certain effect on me though and I’m even sometimes found at an airfield.

And while I can crash a virtual Cessna anywhere nowadays, and even got some other virtual planes in the air, I’m not qualified for any real flying.

Please keep this in mind for everything on this page especially when I describe any flight systems of mine.

This reduces the screen space for other system messages somewhat but is totally worth it. It comes also with the proper visuals for selected airspeed, heading and altitude. The vertical speed is still missing but on my list. I went totally overboard with showing a Mach indication over 0.5 Mach as well 🤓 (Yes, yes you Mr. Smartguy over there. I know this is not 100% correct, doesn’t work for other planets and we don’t even have pressure values from a Pitot Tube. Go get yourself a juicebox. This is for a game!)

On precision

Flight instruments usually display data in realtime. This is not possible with some games like Elite Dangerous that drop data only after a certain threshold was reached. Other games, like Fly Dangerous have a real hose of a data stream going and allow thus for way more precise data. In the end it’s just a game though so who cares how exact this gimmick is when we race around with speed that would leave us splattered all over the next bulkhead in reality.

I’m still tweaking this while gaining more experience. It works pretty decent already though, which can be observed in this demo playing Fly Dangerous.

There is also an unlisted demo video in 4K available on YouTube. It’s from an earlier development phase though and a lot more clunky so keep that in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC-XpirO920

I’ve yet to record a better demonstration of this.

Originally posted at https://simpit.dev/systems/pfd/