22 September 2026 · Africa Flying

Simulation arena: a mirror of the simulator, not a field fleet

The cockpit section of a retired MD-90 airliner on the floor of a hangar at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, March 2024, set aside to build a simulator for the X-66 research aircraft. — A cockpit being turned into a NASA flight simulator, March 2024. Not an Africa Flying device.Credit: NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center / Steve Freeman, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain. Source.

The arena copies the simulator. It does not replace it.

The arena page (not part of this public preview) is a 1,000-hectare airport, about 3.16 kilometres on a side, one metre per unit. Four named runways, a tower, a terminal, hangars, and static pads for catalog aircraft. Those pads are models, not traffic.

Pose comes from the simulator’s telemetry feed on the development stack. The PX4 simulator is placed with an east-north-up frame around home latitude −1.286389, longitude 36.817223. The ROS 2 simulator is drawn on pad B, not at its real location. Pose is kinematic. There is no lift model and no terrain mesh.

The elevation lookup was failing when this was written, so clearance altitude is often empty even while the telemetry is saved.

Telemetry socket VR Missions

Simulation arena: a mirror of the simulator, not a field fleet

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