Model simulator

CRRCSim

The brilliant flight simulator, FlightGear, gets a lot of positive publicity, because it's a hugely ambitious open source project that works. It's complex, comprehensive, and deeply immersive, allowing anyone with the bandwidth plus the storage to hold its huge amounts of terrain data to fly many different aircraft types across almost anywhere in the world. However, FlightGear isn't the only flight simulator available. We also have CRRCSim. CRRCSim isn't quite as ambitious as FlightGear, but that's literally because of its scale – it simulates flying model aircraft in a field (or over a beach) rather than real aircraft across the American Midwest.

This lack of scale also means that CRRCSim has a real and very practical use, because one of the hardest elements of learning to fly model aircraft is getting an intuition of where left, right, up, and down might be while you're standing in the middle of a field looking at your aircraft flying towards you. It's cheaper to crash two dozen virtual models than it is to crash the real thing, and CRRCSim really helps you get your bearings. This means that even though it has not been updated since drones took most of this thinking out of the process, it's still a valuable tool. You can select your environment, use a USB controller, choose between different aircraft, create your own models and fly them, and even fly with your mouse and mouse wheel if you have nothing else at hand. It also is great fun, as you can quickly restart with a new piece of kit and test it out flying into the headwind. There's even a plan view of the wind, so you can take your experimentation further and see how you're able to handle the changing environment.

Project Website

https://sourceforge.net/projects/crrcsim

Ideal for drone pilots in training everywhere.