Type an address into the search box and a Pilatus PC-12 drops you over that spot, rendered on Google’s photorealistic 3D map of the place. Your neighborhood, your office, the stadium down the road. Push the throttle up and you’re flying over it. Click the plane and you climb into the cabin, where there’s a bottle of whisky you can pour and a newspaper on the seat with the day’s top story.
It runs in a web browser on an ordinary laptop. I built it as a personal project, to see how far interactive 3D could go now that AI can write so much of the code.
Fly it yourself here. Use a laptop or desktop, since flying needs a keyboard, and turn the sound on.
What you can do in it
- Fly over your city. Search for a city or an address and you’re there. Anywhere Google has mapped in 3D looks photoreal. The keyboard handles nose up and down, banking, leveling the wings, and the throttle.
- Look around. Orbit the camera around the aircraft, and double-click to reset the view.
- Climb aboard. Click the plane to get in, and click a seat to sit down.
- Pour a whisky. Click the bottle, then the glass.
- Read the paper. The newspaper on the seat carries the top story of the day you’re flying.
None of those cabin details were necessary. I put them in anyway.
How I built it
The aircraft is a 3D model, exterior and interior, prepared in Blender. The cabin lighting is baked into the textures, so it looks warm without asking a laptop to calculate light in real time. The ground underneath is Google’s photorealistic 3D tiles, the same kind of 3D imagery Google Earth uses, streamed into the browser with three.js as you fly.
The tiles gave me the one real headache. Out of the box, the tile library throws away whatever it loaded first when memory fills up, so the airport I was circling would drop out and reload while scenery I’d already left behind stayed in memory. I had the cache flipped to keep whatever is near the plane and let go of the places behind it. Small change, but it’s the difference between a city that holds together and one that keeps falling apart around you.
The code was written with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. My job was directing it: how the plane should feel in a bank, how the camera should settle when you climb aboard, what happens when you click a glass. Then I flew each build and sent it back when something felt off. I recorded that back-and-forth step by step in the making-of video:
Why a video studio builds a flight sim
Because more of the training and marketing work we’re asked about now needs the audience to do something with it.
Training teams want learners to practice. An aircraft systems course works better when a technician can walk around the airframe, open a panel and trace a circuit, and a safety orientation sticks when a new hire can find the exits in a 3D version of their own facility. Marketing teams want something similar for products: a demo a buyer can open from a link and take apart in a browser tab.
Most of what went into this project carries over. The aircraft came through the same Blender pipeline we use for 3D animation, just optimized so a normal laptop can explore it. Clicking a bottle to pour it is the same click-and-see mechanic we build into the interactive eLearning modules we make for learning and development teams, where a click might show what a breaker powers instead. And because the map data is photoreal, a training or sales piece can take place at the customer’s actual site or route. Learners and buyers open it from a link in the browser they already use.
Who made the decisions
AI made it possible for me to build something that used to need a game studio, and it let me try ideas I’d never have had the hours to code myself. The decisions that make the sim worth clicking were still creative ones. Starting you over your own city instead of on a generic runway was a creative call, and so was the newspaper that changes every day.
It’s the same instinct we’ve brought to animation for more than fifteen years: figure out what the viewer should feel, then build toward it. AI gave me far more to build with on this one.
Want something like this for your team?
If you’re planning interactive training or a product demo people can explore, tell us what you want your audience to be able to do. Fly the PC-12 first if you haven’t.