It started in front of the Wright Flyer.
I'm İlker Kurtel, a developer, and I live in Turkey. On a trip to the United States I spent two days at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and saw there where flying began. When I stood in front of the 1903 Wright Flyer, I wanted to make this site.
The name comes entirely from that aircraft. On 17 December 1903 it stayed in the air for twelve seconds, and every other aircraft here came later.
The 3D Wright Flyer on its page is the museum's own scan of that same aircraft.
Get in touch
If a date, a number or a name is wrong, write to me at ilkerkurtel@gmail.com and I'll fix it. You can also find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, X and Instagram.
Sources
The 3D models, and the places the simulator flies over, come from these people and projects.
Aircraft
- 1903 Wright Flyer and Bell X-1: 3D scans by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, CC0.
- Ingenuity: NASA/JPL-Caltech. NASA does not endorse this site.
- Blériot XI, Douglas DC-3, Heinkel He 178 and Lockheed SR-71: Emmanuel Baranger; Sopwith Camel: A. F. Scrub and the FlightGear Camel team; Boeing 707: Lake of Constance Hangar; Boeing 787-8: Narendran Muraleedharan, Dwayne Gable and Nicky Ivy; Northrop B-2: Markus Zojer; North American X-15: Mike Hill, Jon S. Berndt and John Check; Boeing 747 (the 747-200 model), Concorde and Airbus A380: FlightGear contributors. All from the FlightGear aircraft collection, GPL v2 or later, converted to glTF; the converted files are offered under the same licence, and the converter is in
tools/fg2glb.mjs. The Spirit of St. Louis is drawn from its published dimensions. - The film behind the home page's Wright Flyer: Wilbur Wright's flight at Centocelle, Italy, in 1909, shot from the aircraft itself. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Places
- Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen); 3DEP, SRTM and GMTED2010 courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; contains Copernicus EU-DEM data.
- Imagery in the United States: USGS The National Map.
- Imagery elsewhere: EOxCloudless 2024 by EOX IT Services GmbH, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2024, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- Runway positions: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
- The places are shown as they are today, not as they were on the day of each flight.