Foraying into Flight Simulation and Control

How did it come about? Infected with Covid, once again, I was in self-imposed lockdown in my room so to not pass it on. Eventually I got sufficiently bored, and played a bit with a browser-based flight simulator I had just discovered: GeoFS. I had not seen a flight simulator since the early 1990s. No, they don’t look the same anymore in the mid 2020s. How time flies!

The inevitable happened, I got myself hooked a little bit, and really needed to figure out how to smoothly land the plane on these tiny strips that they call runways. Quite honestly, I don’t know how real pilots manage to do this, but I am glad they do. As a software engineer, almost inevitably by instinct, I wonder how to get automation steer the aircraft. Interesting challenge. Entirely safe to do in a simulator.

Beyond the draws of tinkering with automation, the flight simulator provides the stimulus exploring many more areas: the physics that make flight possible, navigation on the almost-spherical planet Earth, as well as the pure software challenges of reverse-engineering and extending the code base of the simulator itself.

In this little series, I will share some of the little joys I find on this curiosity-led journey into the world of modeling & simulation, navigation & mapping, aviation, control theory, as well as software (reverse) engineering. Fasten your seatbelts, this learning trip will surely be a bit of a bumpy ride.