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Ex-airman Kenneth Mockford lives by the motto – if he can’t afford it, he’ll make it.
The 59-year-old grandfather, whose great-uncle invented the internationally recognised distress call ‘mayday”, has built multiple flight simulators from scratch for his Sim2Do business in Mildenhall.
As someone who has very little interest in flying or aircrafts, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Kenneth and his replicas, but it’s safe to say I ended my session not only impressed but also a new-found respect for pilots.
We’ll pretend it was not down to the fact I may have struggled slightly when it came to keeping the ‘plane’ level while it soared through the sky 3,000 feet above the ground.
Kenneth, who lives in Burwell near Newmarket, but grew up in South Africa, has built a number of aircraft simulators in his garden shed which include a Boeing 737 plane, a Lynx Helicopter, a F35 fighter jet and his most recent one, a Spitfire.
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His creations are so realistic that trainee pilots are able to use them to practice for their flight exams. The experience can also naturally be great presents for family members and friends looking for something a bit different.
During lockdown in 2020, the grandfather-of-one took on the challenge of building the Spitfire replica, and spent more than two years constructing the front half of the fighter aircraft.
“My favourite moment so far this year was when I took off in the Spitfire for the first time in January,” Kenneth said.
“I actually started getting tears in my eyes from it because this one is scratch-built and I’m very proud of it, it was a big job.
“I couldn’t take off actually at first and had to read a book by a Spitfire pilot which explained how to do it, and that helped”.
“With the Spitfire you need to sit in it and be scared and feel in trouble and you need to be able to see the stubble on the pilot’s face before shooting in a Spitfire.”
The pilot can also fight up to 19 enemy aircrafts during a flight.
He spent £30,000 buying parts for the fuselage using blueprints, making many parts individually from scratch.
So although I was unable to fly the Spitfire due to it being single-seat, I was given the opportunity to ‘fly’ something else. Considering the only thing I’ve flown before is a kite, I had no clue how difficult it would be.
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Turns out, it’s pretty tricky. Who would have thought?
After a brief flight from Kenneth in the Lynx Helicopter, which was converted from an original airframe, I was taken aback by how incredibly detailed, professional and immersive it all was.
Kenneth’s love for engineering and aircrafts is inherited from his family, where a passion for planes runs back for generations.
His father, Ray, served in the RAF in Rhodesia and later worked for an aircraft manufacturer in Africa, while his grandfather Arthur, and great-uncle Frederick all served in the RAF.
Frederick even invented the internationally recognised distress call ‘mayday”, which he conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s while working as officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport.
Kenneth’s fondest story from his childhood in South Africa was when his father was testing the radio he had installed on a Bell 47 helicopter before a test flight over the Drakensberg mountains.
“I used to ask if I could have a go with the pilots and my father was fine with it which I loved of course,” he said.
“We were above the mountains and my dad asked for the aircraft to be thrown about a bit to see how stable the radio was, and the pilot then gave me control.
“Obviously, as a nine-year-old I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and this helicopter was going everywhere while I was doing it. We were very high and the pilot just let it happen and was laughing his head off.
“The pilot then stabilised it after my dad said the radio was fine. Afterwards, my dad then said he had never seen anyone throw a helicopter about like that before.
“The pilot came over and said ‘me neither’. So that birthed my love for flying and that’s how it all came all about really.”
With stories like that, I was feeling the pressure stepping into the Boeing 737-800, which made me determined to do a respectable job, just for my own pride.
Maintaining the plane level was no easy task as the lines and dots I was supposed to keep close to on the cockpit dashboard were moving which certainly kept me on my toes (not literally though).
It was like watching a penalty shootout I was that tense, as I tried not to make a fool of myself, which obviously is quite hard to do considering I was not actually flying a plane and I had Kenneth next to me, who has dedicated almost the last decade of his life on making these aircraft simulators.
In 2014, the engineering-fanatic actually quit his high-paying job as head of engineering at Baxter Healthcare UK and decided to turn his shed hobby into a flight simulator business, before opening Sim2Do in August 2016.
Kenneth also believes another major reason for why he is so good at what he does is due to what he calls ‘a superpower’.
He said: “I have high-functioning autism, which I class as a gift and for me it’s the ability to see way more than anyone else can see.”
“People with high-functioning autism and autism in general, have the ability to focus on a specific subject and can give more detail about that thing more than anyone else.
“Autistic people are also generally very rarely show emotion, but once I had a nonverbal person, go for a flight and then give me a hug afterwards.
The parent with them said they have never in their life seen that before and was really surprised, so that was a really nice feeling because it was so unexpected
“Some people think that high functioning autism means there is something wrong with you, whereas I see it as something that is right with you. It is a superpower.”
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