In the past, this kind of thing would usually be handled by "someone" (i.e. YOU) actively offering to contribute product/vendor specific work back to the FlightGear project, often by receiving free hardware in return (donation).
To be honest however, this has rarely worked out "directly" - i.e. what would usually happen is that some contributors receive such hardware (usually for free) and then they actively talk/post patches for weeks/months, but sooner or later things will calm down, without anything significant having happened necessarily.
For some background info, refer to the FSWeekend talks in the devel list, where some of the senior project contributors received hardware from Saitek - but it's mainly "talks" and "ideas", not necessarily much in terms of a concrete ROI (patches/code) for the donor of said hardware, to see for yourself, refer to:
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... l_list=allIn other words, you could definitely be the right person - it doesn't seem to make much of a difference if the recipient of such donations is an active project contributors/core developer or not - it seems more important to have related skills and spare time. Other than that, there's no reason to feel bad about it - you only need to look at the backlog of patches that were contributed to the project, that were never really accommodated/accepted. So, there's that too.
And there's actually a pattern to that, i.e. you can find other examples, where significant hardware contributions were received by individual contributors, solely based on being actively involved in the project - your role (if any) doesn't seem to have much bearing, see for example:
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... l_list=allHowever, the common theme is that recipients of such hardware share their gratitude by posting on the forum, the devel list, the newsletter/changelog or the wiki in general favorably referring to the donor company - at some point, there also used to be a dedicated "Thanks" file that would be shown as part of the help/about dialog, but other than that, the project doesn't have dedicated protocols or channels to deal with the situation at hand.
Subject: Free aircraft helicopter simulator Flightgear vs Oculus RiftThorsten wrote:The problem with basically all expensive bits of hardware is that most developers don't have them and nobody is supplying them for free - then it's kind of hard to add specific support. Basically this thing only happens if a developer wants expensive bit of hardware X himself, buys it and adds the code.
Realizing that probably explains a lot (like how can we miss so many AMD or Intel chip graphics issues - it'd not happen if someone pays me a couple of different computers with all sorts of graphics hardware so that I can test on all of them, these issues wouldn't occur - but I sure won't spend a lot of money myself).
If in doubt, it'd be best to reach out to the devel list, or the people usually acting as spokesperson of the project - namely Curtis Olson, Torsten Dreyer or James Turner - the latter of whom has been acting as the de facto project lead and primary core developer for the better part of the last decade anyway (nature and degree of activity/involvement, hats he's wearing, community reputation etc):
https://www.openhub.net/p/flightgear/co ... an=30+dayssearch.php?st=0&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&keywords=saitek+fsweekend