Creative: Turkish Airlines Children’s Day Special Flight

This is creative and amazing! Turkish Airlines conducted a special flight on Children’s Day in Turkey, using motion capture technology to control an aircraft from the ground; becoming the first airline to use motion capture technology for a communications project.

The data captured from children doing roll, pitch and yaw manoeuvres by infrared cameras, in a specially equipped hangar, were then relayed to the pilots of the aircraft, effectively giving control to the seven children aged between 7 and 10.

The aircraft was a Boeing 777-300/ER with registration TC-JJI and making Flight TK6946, which took off from Istanbul Airport. The flight was conducted in a closed airspace, with a 10-mile radius over Antalya at an altitude between 6,000 and 8,000 feet. With Captains Serpil Köstepen, Cihangir Kılıç and the “Kid Captain” at the helm, the flight was based on motion data captured by infrared cameras. The film was shot with cameras working at the same light spectrum, with the infrared cameras being used for motion capturing.

The film begins with the sequence of children doing the preflight checks of the aircraft in hangar, followed by the kid captain wearing the special suit that captured his motions and then relayed the data to the pilots in the air. Following the manoeuvres and mimicking the moves made by the kid captain on the ground, the aircraft requests landing permission and ends with actual pilots meeting the children.

“To commemorate this special day, we handed over the controls of this special flight to our children. As the national flag carrier of this nation, we will continue to introduce cutting edge technology into aviation and deploy latest innovations in our products and services” he noted.

M. İlker Aycı, Chairman of the Board and the Executive Committee of Turkish Airlines