Man instructed he is ‘not intelligent sufficient to be pilot’ builds £25k simulator in spare room

A dad who was told he “wasn’t clever enough” to be a pilot has built an incredible £25,000 flight simulator – in his spare room.

Craig Cullingworth, 40, spent two years building his accurate model of a Boeing 737-800NG cockpit with mostly second-hand parts he sourced online. And using a computer program, he now takes to the skies with his “obsessed” daughter, Sophie, eight, from the comfort of their home in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

The car painter’s plan to create the replica came after his wife, Sarah, 38, got him a simulator experience at a local flight centre as a Christmas present. He then bought a cockpit shell – with all the dials and levers found on the real twin-engine aircraft – and painstakingly turned it into a fully working model.

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Craig, who took his maiden voyage about three months ago, said: “I always wanted to be a pilot, but at school, I was told I wasn’t clever enough. My wife got me a Boeing 737 experience because she knew how much I wanted to do it.

“It was the best experience of my life and on my way home, I was searching how to build one. I found bits and bobs all over the country and started building it in my spare room after work in a bid that one day I could get it flying.

“About three months ago, we did our first flight which I shared a video of on social media and gained lots of positive feedback.”

He added: “My eight-year-old daughter is obsessed. She likes to just get involved with stuff and she takes it in very quickly. She enjoys flying it and I enjoy flying with her.”

Craig said his original flight simulator teacher, who is also a first officer at Ryanair, thought he was a “natural” after their first lesson together in 2021. And he later earned his wings on the lifelike computer model, which professional pilots from carriers like Virgin and Jet2 often use to improve their skills.

Now he likes to fly on his simulator in real time through the skies over Britain so he can have fun navigating tricky regional runways.

Craig said: “I’ll take off from Leeds-Bradford, and I’ll land at Manchester, and go over to the East Midlands, and down to Heathrow, so I stay within the UK. By the time you’ve landed, prepared for landing and taken back off again to go to the next airport, you can lose three hours easily. So I tend to keep it local. And I usually do Leeds-Bradford for the fact that it’s one of the top ten worst airports to land in, and it’s usually quite tricky – and because we fly from there quite a lot.”

He added: “Doing it at home is fun but there is only so many times you can fly around airports on your own in your spare room. It’s not a straightforward process and it is usually a two-man crew effort, and you share the duties between each other.”

The cost of buying a new Boeing 737 flight simulator is around £55,000, but Craig thinks he spent less than half that on his model by using second-hand parts. And flight simulator experiences usually cost between £100 to £150 for 30 to 90 minutes of time ‘in the air’.

Craig said: “I’ve met people all over the country who have built their own flight sims but you tend to find they are retired pilots who build them and not people my age. The experience is so hands-on that you won’t know if you’re any good at it until you actually give it a go.”

Craig said he may now offer other interested flyers the chance to use his simulator – or others he builds in the future – as part of a business venture.

He said: “My body shop is expanding so we will have more space for me to set up two or three simulators for people to use. I want to target pilots because they can do their training on these simulators.”