Flight School

How it plays

Hand it to a kid and say nothing. Tap a pilot — the fox or the dragon (that tap also unlocks sound) — pick a buddy to carry (bigger buddy = heavier = harder to fly), and choose a destination from three picture cards. Then fly: a thumb anywhere on the left half of the screen becomes a floating stick — up/down to climb and dive, left/right to turn — and the plane rights itself when you let go. A green throttle lever on the right controls the engine — the day’s one new lever to master (pull it back and the auto-throttle takes over again). Line up over the target, press the big red DROP, and a parachute lowers the buddy; it thumps down, stands up, waves, and stays there forever. Fly low back over the runway to return to the hangar for the next trip. There are now two aircraft in the hangar: the trainer and a seaplane that rides on floats — set it down on the water and the landing earns a special patch.

There’s no score and nothing to crash into. The one thing a child absorbs without being told: pull up too hard and the plane runs out of speed — it gets “sleepy,” the nose drops, and it wakes itself up; diving builds the speed back. A heavier buddy makes all of that happen sooner.

How it’s built

Flight School is a single self-contained HTML file. Three.js (r150) is vendored in the repo and inlined at build time by a zero-dependency build.js, so the shipped game makes no CDN calls and needs no network once loaded. Deliveries persist in localStorage, so the world each child builds accretes one airdrop at a time.

The core is an honest, tested flight model: the aerodynamics live in a small, framework-free module with a physics acceptance test that proves the energy lesson — a sustained pull stalls, a dive recovers, and a heavier payload stalls sooner. Everything a parent would want to tune (destinations named after real places, each kid’s pilot, the cargo’s mass) sits in one CONFIG block at the top of the game.