The whine of the turbo-fans as they spool up. The squeak of the brakes as you taxi along the tarmac. The rumble and shudder of the cockpit as you push the twin throttles forward and rotate the lumbering Boeing 737 into the blue...
Except the "plane" is still on the ground – and it's sitting in an unassuming garden shed in the Perth northern suburb of Ballajura.
Meet the "nerds of a feather" who each week pilot flight simulators so complete and accurate, they rival the real thing.
Indeed, if fitter machinist Gwyn Perrett gets his way, his replica 737 cockpit will soon be certified by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority as a training aid for commercial pilots.
It's taken Mr Perrett four years, $35,000 and countless hours to build his labour of love – the second incarnation of a flight simulator project originally started 10 years ago.
And he can thank his erstwhile passengers for the inspiration.
"I was always into sims [simulators] - ever since my dad bought a personal computer in the 80s," Mr Perrett said.
"But what I always wanted to do was fly. So in 1999, I started learning to fly at Jandakot and soon passed my General Flying Progress Test, which allowed me to carry passengers.
"That was really the beginning of the end.
"I just wanted to joyride, but my passengers didn't want to be thrown around in the back of a plane – they didn't want to do any of the fun stuff."
For a man with a mortgage and kids, it was also a financial drain. Mr Perrett soon found himself spending less time in the air and more time on his desktop simulator.
In 2004, a fellow flight-sim enthusiast asked him to build a throttle quadrant for an Airbus A320 – an exercise that not only paid handsomely, but led to a new business venture, Aerosim Solutions.
"It took me 10 months to build that throttle down to the last detail," he explained. "Having to give it away at the end was heart-breaking – it was so much better than anything I'd ever built for myself.
"Before I knew it, I was building my own a cockpit."
And a small business.
Discovering growing demand for flight-sim controls and panels – the alternative being expensive second-hand aircraft parts - Mr Perrett started fashioning more.
"It's a rich market," he said. "But one of the consequences of building exact replica parts is that suddenly my old cockpit sim wasn't that good anymore.
"That's when I set out to build an exact replica."
Mr Perrett said a similar turn-key cockpit sim would cost "in the region of $120,000-$150,000".
"It's a lot of money, but it's actually cheaper than flying for real," he said.
"I've got a personal friend who's a Qantas 737 captain – he's been around a few times and says it's as good as any commercial sim.
"It surprises me that real airline captains are still passionate and want to be playing with flight sims. He likes it because there's more freedom in it – he can fly any way he likes."
The cockpit sim has also given Mr Perrett and other enthusiasts – who meet at his house each week to "fly" realistic sorties – a chance to give back to the community.
A team of nine Perth-based "pilots" has just completed an around-the-world fund-raising adventure called Worldflight, which links global simulators in a series of real-time "flights", complete with virtual air-traffic control.
The Perth team raised $5000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which received $200,000 Australia-wide.
"We had a chief flying instructor and two real pilots as crew members, so we were getting trained properly," Mr Perrett said.
"I learned a hell of a lot about airliner operations. Of the nine guys, I wouldn't hesitate to say any one of them could fly a real airliner if they had to."
The team will soon start training for Worldflight 2015, and will be adding another crew-member's 747 cockpit sim, which is in the final stages of completion.
Based in Belmont, Greg Hateley's 747 flight-sim features an original Boeing throttle quadrant and is just as realistic as Mr Perrett's 737.
Like Mr Perrett, Mr Hateley - chief engineer at Perth radio station 96FM - has built his simulator from scratch.
"I wanted it to be as realistic as possible," Mr Hately said. "A lot of us probably wanted to be airline pilots back in the day, but for one reason or another it didn't turn out that way.
"This is the next best thing. I've spent a lot of time and money building it, but I would have spent even more learning how to fly."
It's a sentiment echoed by another Worldflight Perth crew member, Darren Bathurst of Kingsley. Like Mr Perrett, he tried his hand at flying real aircraft before discovering how expensive it was.
"I couldn't justify the $75,000 for a commercial pilot's licence only to risk not having a job at the other end," Mr Bathurst said.
"It's a young man's game. Besides, this is more fun. You can sit in the cockpit and have a beer, chill out and throw the aircraft around – no-one in the back is going to start screaming at you."
Virtual air-traffic controller Kirk Christie, of Caversham, also took part in Worldflight. His day job involves maintenance work at Perth Airport.
Like the wanna-be pilots, Mr Christie had originally wanted to be an air-traffic controller but found it hard to scrape up the funds and time to train.
"With everything, money becomes a problem: you have to study while holding down a full-time job," he said.
"This satisfies my desire to be an air-traffic controller – it's enough for me to keep me happy at the moment.
"I'm probably 50/50 on flying versus air-traffic controlling. But it's one of those things you can take a break from, do something else, and can always come back to when you're ready.
"That's the beauty of this hobby."
Just don't call it a "game".
"You can start arguments over that topic: is it a game, or is it a simulator? At the end of the day it's an entertainment product. You're doing it to enjoy yourself."
