I made a flight simulator, except you're just a passenger
Details
- External ID
- 49693971
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I made a flight simulator, except you're just a passenger
- Website domain
- inflightsimulator.com
- Launched
- Sept. 14, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 441
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9952153110047847
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 18, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 18, 2026, 5:02 p.m.
Description
Buckle your seatbelt, secure your tray table, and open your window shade. Now you can simulate flying anywhere in the world as a commercial passenger, from takeoff to touchdown. Terrain, weather, and realtime sun position included. Don't worry, the latest release now features legs, so you can get up and go to the bathroom on longer flights. Enjoy!
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Workflow automation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- flight simulator where you sit as a passenger
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A web wrapper or simple 3D cabin scene is straightforward, but rendering the entire globe with realistic terrain, dynamic weather, real-time solar positioning, and smooth flight simulation in a browser requires complex geospatial 3D graphics work.
What it would actually take: A realistic simulator requires WebGL/WebGPU rendering engines like CesiumJS, three.js, or Babylon.js integrated with global 3D geospatial terrain datasets (e.g., Cesium ion, Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles) and dynamic sky/atmospheric scattering models. The hard part is managing Level-of-Detail (LOD) streaming over high-speed flight paths, realistic procedural cloud rendering, and coordinate transformations between geographic and local 3D spaces without memory leaks or frame drops. Requires expertise in 3D graphics programming and geospatial streaming.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Cannot completely eliminate fear of flying anxiety due to loss of agency
Feature requests: Passenger view/seat perspective for fear of flying training, Crying baby extension pack, Get to your seat MMO mode, Inflight simulator 1980 retro theme
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 77 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #1 of 78 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 285 days after the earliest competitor.
- Elsewhere · ph · 2026-09-18 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- nonstopflightsfrom.com · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Artemis II Moon Mission Simulator in the Browser · hn · 2026-04-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Rocket Launch and Orbit Simulator · hn · 2026-01-09 · 166 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- farseer.space · hn · 2026-09-15 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- I calculated sun/shade exposure for every seat at World Cup stadiums · hn · 2026-03-12 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Gravity · hn · 2026-06-09 · 217 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- LYVR · ph · 2026-09-23 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a workflow automation tool for Real estate yet.