Hi Ian,
the pilot is animated using 6 x HS55 servos. There are two doing the pitch levers and four controlling the cyclic arms. The pilot is a "1 Direction" doll that was on sale cheap in Sainsburys. I cut the Head/shoulders and Hands off, then made a very light weight wire skeleton (stick man almost) to hold the clothes, then packed it with cotton wool. This was a saving of about 180g over the full body, which was solid plastic.
In the video below, I control the pilot by having a second receiver bound to the same model memory. This way the controls of the pilot are accurate to the flying, but if there is a pilot failure or if something binds, it won't effect flight controls or drain my receiver pack. So thinking fail safe really. I originally made this to match imputs from a 120deg CCPM mix, but now I'm running flybarless I'm back to 1 servo 90deg, so I'm using a V-tail mixer unit to mix the Aileron and Elevator controls, as per the original 120ccpm route.
Main cockpit construction, so seats, floors, panels and everything else is plasticard, with the seats being sheet foam (dolls house material) and the carpet is again self adhesive dolls house carpet, all cheap materials from my local Hobbycraft. Fire extinguishers are just small pieces of dowel painted and then plastic tube added for the tops.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AGVKc58AgEWhen I started this project I actually made a depron version, which was easy to knock together and then used as a template for this final one.
