It is well-known that one of the pilots of the missing Malaysia Air 777 had an elaborate flight-simulator at his house. I found a picture of it and thought I would try to figure out what hardware and software he had from the images. The image above came up again and again, so I started there.

It’s an incredible setup. From examining the above image you can see he has three huge (27″?) Panasonic screens that appear to be touch-capable (although why he would need that I don’t know) and running Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, along with a console, also from Microsoft Flight Simulator, on the smaller bottom-center monitor and a control panel being displayed on what I assume is also a touch-screen monitor that you can barely see at the top-right of the picture. He’s using this Saitek flight yoke at the bottom of the image with the green display (the blue-tipped lever to its right is part of it) and what I’m pretty confident is a Saitek Cybork Evo flight-sim joystick in the lower left corner. I also see a standard Microsoft optical mouse and keyboard. 

I found this collage of images indicating the hardware he used in the PC controlling it all:

He loved Asus! I can see a Rampage IV motherboard that can handle the latest-gen Intel Core i7 processors, not one but TWO HD7970 video cards which run on the Raedon Graphics Processing Unit from AMD so he must have been planning to run them in parallel (known as Scalable Link Interface, or SLI), but I wouldn’t have used Raedon-based cards for that; I would have used GeForce cards instead, especially because they pioneered the technology as can be seen in the SLI link. On the other hand, he may be using one to power the main displays, and the other to power the two control consoles. I also see a SilverStone Strider Gold 1000W power supply, which is a beast of a cooling mechanism, way more than a regular PC would need, however no liquid cooling as far as I can tell, nor can I see any indication of RAM.

Even with all of this, it is not – in my opinion – cause for alarm, many flight enthusiasts do something similar. Don’t believe it? Check out the home flight simulator this guy built! There is also some really advanced cockpit-simulator software out there. Aviation enthusiasts don’t screw around. The files he allegedly deleted cause me some concern, but I’ll wait until there is more information.