The focus of the flight sim community is often with airliners. These big, heavy birds are so out of reach for the normal person that the ability to replicate a realistic operation in the simulator is the primary focus of most simmers.
But that shouldn’t detract from just how popular general aviation, light aircraft flying is within the community. That’s very apparent here at FSExpo, where there are just as many booths selling products enhancing the user’s airliner simulation as there are bits and pieces for Cessna 172s and PA28s.
One such booth in that latter category is that of Altimeter Motives. I headed over to the booth to have a chat with the CEO Ron Sarotre.
”What I wanted didn’t exist”, he told me; “So I built it”. Ron founded his company back in 2019, which sells an elaborate and affordable solution to simmers seeking a steam gauge home cockpit. Essentially it’s a panel which sits in front of a desktop monitor, attached by high-strength bands which are held onto the screen with a VESA mount. That, in tandem with an included Raspberry Pi with some firmware, projects the stream gauge instruments onto the monitor and the panel covers any black areas. The panel also comes with a number of twisty dials for the simmer to manually adjust their QNH setting, artificial horizon, HSI and other instruments – plus other controls for appropriate aircraft.
Ron’s newest product, which is debuting at this weekend’s show, is a PA28 panel. His first product was a panel for the Cessna 172, but he told me lots of simmers had been requesting something for the popular Piper trainers. “Many simmers told us the Cessna panel was a compromise and they wanted a manifold pressure gauge”, said Ron. With the PA28 panel, this is exactly what they now get. Ron even showed me the gauges moving as he adjusted the throttle in his simulator running the Just Flight PA28 for MSFS.
However Ron’s most popular product is his panel for the Beechcraft Baron. ”People love it, the twin engines. The panel works with the [Cessna] 310 and the King Air too”. People love it so much, in fact, that as I was conducting this interview we had to keep pausing as more and more simmers made purchases. In the half hour we were talking he sold 2 Barons and a PA28, so there’s clearly interest here.
Ron has been an avid simmer since the 1980s, long before the hobby really ‘took off’ in the way it has today. Retired, and with MSFS 2020 releasing soon, he decided to create his own custom panel which birthed the company. He tells me that he took a handful of them to the San Diego FSExpo where he received a lot of interest. The most common question? “Do you have a version for the [Garmin] G5?”
Back then the answer was no, but he has since built one – and if the footfall at his booth is anything to go by, then they’re selling like hot cakes.
Stay tuned to our website and socials as we continue to bring you the latest news, announcements and information from FSExpo at Providence, RI.
