I was dryfitting all of the components, some finished and some not, to the cockpit just to see how that went together and made an alarming discovery. the instrument panel is shoved up against the ejection seat, and I still have to attack the little yellow bugger with the black stripes on it to the front of the seat! and plus, I don’t think it is supposed to be that way. I triple checked the instructions and so far, I have done everything Hasegawa said to do and I did it according to the instructions.
so I will sum up my looong story up there.
Is the seat supposed to be cramped into the panel like that?
pics:
the pics frustratingly show many many more mistakes than I could ever make out with my eyes.
The little yellow thing that you refer to is the ejection handle, and there isn’t alot of space between the pedestal and the seat on the real thing, but yours do look just a little too tight.
In the cockpit of the Lawn Dart there is very little room between the seat & the center console, maybe just about an inch & 1/2 distance between the two, what scale 16 are you doing? If you have an PE set for the cockpit use the “D” ring (The funny looking thing that sits in front center of the ACES II seat) from the PE set instead of the kit part, this should give you more wiggle room, also use a resin seat instead of the kits too, the resin is far more detailed and fits better then the kits seat, True Details has a great set of seats for just a couple of $$ (maybe $5.00 at the most)
One of my friends is an F-16 pilot, and I got to go and spend the day wih him on “Family Day” at Luke AFB here in Phoenix, AZ. He took us out to the F-16 they had set up for display, and I was amazed at how tightly he fit into the cockpit. (He’s about 6’1"). It looked as though his knees were jammed against the IP, and I felt the same way - that if he had to eject he’d leave his legs from the knees down in the plane.
Well, a month or so ago in Germany he did have to eject, and from what I understand, he came thru it with just some bumps and bruises.
I never realized how small the cockpits were just from looking at photos and models until I got to see the real thing. To get in you have to do some sort of gymnastic move of holding onto the sides, and swinging your legs up and over the sides and down into the little spaces where the rudder pedals are, while keeping your head underneath the edges of the canopy.
My son is, for the time being, a crew chief on an F-16. At the last air show, here in Fort Smith, I was allowed to go out on the flight line and watch all the preflight procedures before they launched and did their demonstration. Afterwards, I got to climb up and look into the cockpit and I have to agree. Not a whole lot of room.
At the next air show I’ll hopefully, get to do the same thing with an A-10 as they will be transitioning soon.
At the airshow here in September, they had the Terre Haute Air Gaurd planes out with the CO’s plane there and him sitting in the cockpit all day. I took my daughter so “she”[:D] could have a look around the inside. I said to him it looked like it would be a real tight fit and uncomfortable on a long ride, and he said yeah, it gets pretty cramped up here on a long flight, then he remembered to be professional and said it was ok cause they way you sat, it fit like a glove… I think he meant the first statement more than the second [:D]
