The modern electronic flight bag (EFB) is an incredibly powerful tool for commercial pilots, whether engaged in flight planning or improving situational awareness on the ground or in the air. Since the purpose of the EFB as a tool is to improve safety and reduce costs, pilots must learn to use it well.  While studying the available capabilities and features can be done at home or in a hotel room, nothing compares to hands-on training in a simulated environment.  A simulator provides a realistic experience for the pilot, without exposing them, their cargo, or their passengers to any risk inherent in learning to use the new tool in context.

Bad Elf offers a range of products that enable flight simulator operators to deliver accurate position information being flown in the simulator directly to the EFB platform.  This capability enables pilots to see own-ship position just like they would in the real world, without the risk.

Simulator Bridge: How It Works

Deploying Bad Elf Simulation Bridge Kits couldn’t be easier.  Bad Elf offers solutions that allow your ARINC based commercial or military simulator, your full motion or desktop PC based simulator to connect to a Bad Elf Bluetooth GPS Pro, which then broadcasts the simulator’s position over Bluetooth wireless connection to any paired EFB.  The EFB can be utilized just as the pilot would expect it to behave on the ground or in the air.

ARINC Flight Simulation Bridge Kits

Bad Elf offers a Commercial Simulation Bridge Kit (BE-SBK-4000) that plugs into a free ARINC 429 interface and listens for the relevant Time, Position, and Movement messages to simulate GPS position while training. Bad Elf’s custom firmware extracts the available data and repackages it as NMEA sentences to broadcast to the proprietary Bluetooth connection necessary to communicate with an iPad or via a serial over Bluetooth protocol stream to feed position data to a Microsoft Surface, PC, or Android tablet.

PC Flight Simulation Bridge Kits

Bad Elf also offers a Professional Simulation Bridge Kit (BE-SBK-2000) that plugs into a free RS-232 or USB port on a PC based flight simulator.  So long as the flight simulation engine can generate the $GPRMC and $GPGGA NMEA sentences and stream them out through a configurable serial port to the Bad Elf simulation bridge kit, that information will be forwarded over Bluetooth directly to the EFB platform to show own-ship position or range rings in the EFB app used by the pilot.

Supported Simulators

Bad Elf supports a wide range of flight simulation vendors.  If yours is not listed, please contact us and we will work with you and your simulator vendor to enable connectivity.

Ongoing Support

Bad Elf understands that flight simulation facilities operate under some of the heaviest workloads of any operational computing resources in the world.  As with the leading manufacturing facilities, every second of down time comes at a significant cost.  Primarily for that reason, Bad Elf bundles a renewable annual ongoing support contract with the purchase of the simulation bridge kits. Most customers acquire one or two extra units per site to ensure that a hardware failure can be remedied as quickly as possible.  Under the ongoing support agreement, Bad Elf commits to being available for support and to replace any defective units as quickly as possible, including same day or next day service where available.