OpenCockpit… FlightDeckSolutions… FlyEngrevity… and many others manufactures out there, but which should I choose?
To make the decision you firs need to answer a few questions… How much you want to spend? How high does the quality have to be before it’s acceptable for you? How easy does the installation needs to be? My decision was a bit of a compromise, first it had to be easy to install but at the same time not too expensive. OpenCockpit was out of the question, nothing against their products, in fact they do have high quality products, I just want nothing to do with SIOC, just a personal choice. FlyEngrevity is just too expensive for me, than I found on the internet FlightDeck Solution, plug and play product at a reasonable price. The instructional manual is very detailed and the pre sales support was fantastic. After sale support I would not know since the installation was so easy I just did not need them.
What got in my way with this product was the back shape of it. because on the FO side I have a dummy CDU, and this is flat , when I was building the CDU bay I needed to be a little creative shaping out the support panel for both CDUs, at the end it worked fine and I am really happy with it. In between the two CDU I have a 12″ monitor for the lower EICAS. It isn’t an expensive one since I am not really concerned with image quality on this display, but with some adjustments to the settings you get a very decent quality, also to be considered that there will be a display cover to go on top of it.
The CDU bay was fully made in MDF, originally I was planning to do it in plywood, but considering all the sanding that I knew I had to do to shape some of the corners I decided to stick to MDF since this is so much more soft and easy to shape. Measure are mostly taken from those used by other builders, however I had to make some adjustments to accommodate the size of my MIP. The final product is not bad. I have 2 videos working the details on how I build it.