A teacher vibe coded a free browser RC flight simulator for locked-down school laptops
The constraint was simple: students who wanted to learn RC flying couldn’t install anything on their school laptops. Most RC simulators are downloads. Many cost money. All of them need permissions a locked-down student machine doesn’t have.
So Alvin Trusty, an educator and RC pilot, built his own. He called it Trusty RC Airfield, and he built it without writing a single line of code himself.
️ What It Does
Trusty RC Airfield is a 3D RC flight simulator that runs entirely in a web browser. No download, no plugin, no account. If a student can open a website, they can fly. The sim runs on modest school hardware too, automatically lowering its resolution when a computer can’t keep up.
The setting is a grass airstrip. You stand behind the fence at the flight line, with a tent, a windsock, a drone race course, and farm fields around the perimeter. It’s modelled on how a real RC club field actually looks.
Controls and Views
Students can fly with a real radio transmitter or with the keyboard. For transmitter users, the sim supports any controller that connects via Bluetooth or USB. Trusty’s drone team uses the RadioMaster Pocket, and the sim includes specific setup instructions for that radio. A setup wizard asks you to move each stick and figures out the channel mapping automatically.
Keyboard controls use the arrow keys for ailerons and elevator, A and D for rudder, and W and S for throttle. The sim offers three views: pilot view from the flight line, a chase camera, and FPV from the cockpit. A field overview window, which you can drag anywhere on screen, keeps the plane in sight when it gets out to the edges of the field.
✈️ The Hangar: Five Aircraft and a Drone
Every aircraft in the sim is based on a real model. Most are planes Trusty flies himself.
- Cub: A high-wing bush plane with flaps, tuned to the factory numbers of a 1.3 m foam Cub, including its habit of dropping a wing if you fly too slowly in a turn.
- F-18 Super Hornet foamie: Modelled on Trusty’s own scratch-built pusher. Hand-launched, with flaperons and stabilators matching his six-channel setup.
- Tundra TPX: A 3D aerobatic profile plane with unlimited vertical, approximately two rolls per second, and enough prop blast to hover.
- Sports Hawk: A 1.5 m electric ducted-fan jet with retracts, flaps, LED lights, and a jet whine, painted in Ohio State scarlet and gray.
- Glider: A 1.5 m powered sailplane with a folding prop. Cut the motor, find a thermal, and a variometer beeps faster as you climb.
The drone gets its own race course behind the tent: five gates and three flags, ground arrows showing the route, a lap timer, and a best-lap record. Crash the drone and one press of the reset switch stands it back up where it landed so you can finish the lap.
⚙️ The Physics
The sim models lift, drag, stalls, wind, gusts, and thermals. Planes tip-stall when flown too slowly. Gliders climb in rising air. Jets spool up like real ducted fans.
The physics aren’t estimated. Trusty asked Claude to find the factory specifications for each plane, locate motor and prop thrust test data, reference NASA’s model of how thermals rise, and pull wind-tunnel research on flat foam wings. Claude tuned each aircraft against those numbers and ran physics tests in the background before handing back each version.
How It Was Built: Vibe Coding with Claude
Trusty didn’t write the code. He built the entire simulator in a long conversation with Claude, Anthropic’s AI. His job was knowing what a good RC sim should feel like. Claude’s job was the programming.
The first prompt was one sentence:
Build a browser-based RC simulator, flown with my RadioMaster Pocket over Bluetooth, with a Cub-style bush plane.
A working simulator came back in about five minutes. Everything after that was Trusty flying it and describing what to change. Requests like “Put the windsock at the same end of the field as the plane” and “Give me a small wide-angle window so I can always see the plane, the tent and the windsock.” Later iterations added collision detection for the fence, cones, windsock, and tent, then flaps and retractable gear.
The part that surprised Trusty most was working from images. He uploaded a German foam plan for a Cub fuselage, and Claude traced its side profile into the 3D model. He gave Claude a photo of his scratch-built foam board F-18 Super Hornet. Claude produced a sim version that, according to Trusty, flies just like the real thing.
What Vibe Coding Actually Taught Him
The lessons Trusty pulled from this build are worth keeping if you’re considering your own AI-assisted project.
- Domain knowledge is the real skill. Claude wrote every line of code. But it took an RC pilot to notice the windsock was at the wrong end of the field, that flaperons should droop at 15% and 30%, or that a gate needs to be an upside-down U shape. The AI handles implementation. You supply judgment.
- Show, don’t just tell. Photos and plans produced better results than paragraphs of description. Uploading a picture of the plane said more than a written spec.
- Small steps win. One change at a time, then fly it, then request the next. When something looked wrong, a screenshot and one sentence fixed it.
- Ask for real data specifically. “Make it realistic” is vague. “Find the real specifications and test against them” is what gave the planes their character.
- You still have to test it. Claude ran background physics checks, but only actually flying the sim revealed what felt right. The build-try-adjust loop is the same one you’d use in any design project.
Try It
The simulator is free and lives at trustyetc.com/RC. Use Chrome or Edge. No transmitter required, but if you have one, here’s the RadioMaster Pocket setup:
- Select a plain model on the radio: aileron, elevator, throttle, and rudder on channels 1 to 4, no mixes.
- Press SYS, open Tools, run ExpressLRS, and choose BLE Joystick.
- Pair ExpressLRS Joystick in your computer’s Bluetooth settings.
- Open the simulator, wiggle a stick, and choose Assign controls.
No radio? Choose Fly with the keyboard and you’re in the air in under a minute.
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