Spitfire Flight Sim

A basic flight sim. A Spitfire, a Bf 109 or a P-51 Mustang, a grass airfield on the south coast, and a lot of sky.

What this is

A flight sim that opens in a browser tab: no install, no account, no ads. An aeroplane that behaves like one - lift and stall, drag, an undercarriage that can fold, battle damage - and air battles over the English Channel short enough to play in a break.

It is a game before it is a history lesson: where history and playability pull apart, playability wins, and this page says where. It also has to run on what people have, so the Graphics setting lowers the detail by itself on a slow machine, and you can fly with a keyboard and mouse, a gamepad or a touch screen.

Game types

Pick Single player or Online, then a game type, then your aircraft and map, and press Fly. Fly again on the first screen repeats your last flight. Best times are kept in this browser.

Free flightTake off from the home airfield, or start in the air at 2,000 ft. No objective.
Fly a bomberA Wellington or a Heinkel He 111 (a test). Take off, fly a circuit and land. The gunners fire by themselves; Space drops the bombs (tap for one, hold for the stick of six). Two escorts take off with you and four enemy fighters are already in the air.
RaceFourteen gates in the sky, against the clock.
CombatShoot down twelve hot-air balloons.
TransportLand at the second airfield to collect a package, then land at the third to deliver it.
Sky battle12 v 12. The map decides who defends: the defenders scramble from the three airfields, the attackers arrive from the sea in a vee. The aircraft you pick decides your side. A side wins when the other is wiped out.
Bomber raidA bomber and six escorts attack an airfield while twelve fighters scramble to stop them. The aircraft you pick decides whether you are one of the fighters or an escort. The bomber's side wins when it drops its bombs on the target, the other side when the bomber is destroyed.
DogfightThree waves of enemy fighters: one, then two, then three.

Online

JoiningJoin a game that is already running, or start a Dogfight, Sky battle or Bomber raid, on any of the three maps. Type a name and press Join.
Pilots and computer pilotsA game takes up to 8 pilots, and 8 more can watch. Team battles are filled out with computer pilots: you take the place of one, and a computer pilot flies on when you leave.
DogfightA free-for-all, first to 10 kills.
Between roundsWhen a round ends you have a few seconds to pick your aircraft for the next one (1 to 4; the fourth is Spectate).

Flying it

Controls Stick: S pulls the nose up, W pushes it down, A and D roll (or the mouse, with "Mouse is the stick" on). Rudder: Q E. Throttle: Shift up, F down, 1-9 and 0 set it, or drag the slider beside the fuel bar. G gear, V flaps, B brakes. Space fires. These are the keys the game starts with: every key, mouse button, gamepad and joystick input can be changed under , and what you read here follows your choices.
Take-off and landingTake off at full throttle; a touch of forward stick lifts the tail at about 70 mph, ease back at about 100. Land with gear and flaps down at about 110 mph and flare gently: arrive too hard and the undercarriage folds.
ServiceLand and stop on any airfield and the aircraft is refuelled, rearmed and repaired over 10 seconds. Fuel lasts about 12 minutes at 60% throttle; you carry 800 rounds.
DamageA hit tears a hole where the bullet struck. Engines steam, smoke and burn, control surfaces droop and cockpit dials crack. A diagram of your aircraft on the screen shows what is hit. At zero health the engine stops, but you can still glide and land.
ViewsC switches between the chase view and the cockpit, with working dials; the mouse wheel zooms between them.
Map and scoreboardM opens a live map of you, your side, the enemy, the objective and the airfields (wheel zooms, drag moves it); the flight carries on behind it. Hold Tab in a battle for every aircraft's health and kills.
Crashed in a Sky battle or Bomber raid?You become a spectator: a free camera (W A S D, Space and C for up and down, the mouse to look), a click to ride in a pilot's seat (click again for the next aircraft), and V to hand the camera to an automatic director. Press T to take over a computer pilot on your side. This works online too.
The menusThey work from the keyboard or a gamepad too: the arrows move, Enter chooses, Esc goes back, and the digits pick the first, second and third tile.

Aircraft

Spitfire Mk IX RAFBest turner, gentle stall, good climb.
Messerschmitt Bf 109 LuftwaffeBest climb and acceleration, hard-hitting nose guns; heavy controls when fast.
P-51D Mustang USAAFFastest, best dive and high-speed roll, six .50s; the slowest climb, a wide turn and a sharp stall.
Vickers Wellington Mk IC and Heinkel He 111 H-6 bombersThe twin-engined bombers. You fly them in Fly a bomber; in Bomber raid the computer does, and their gunners shoot for themselves.

RealEach is modelled on the real aircraft - shape, national markings, a cockpit with its own dials.
SimplifiedThe flight model covers lift, drag, stall, control forces, the undercarriage and ground handling, but not engine torque, wind or weather, and the performance is tuned for each type's character rather than copied from one mark's figures.
Mixed erasThe Spitfire IX entered service in 1942 and the P-51D flew over Europe in 1944, so neither belongs over a 1940 map; the Wellington and the He 111 do.

The maps: what is real and what is made up

Seacombe 36 km, all invented

Invented The whole place. A made-up stretch of south coast whose terrain the game generates: chalk cliffs, downs, a gorge, the fells and a lake. The airfields (Seacombe, High Barrow, Ashcombe), villages, roads and rivers are all imaginary. It is the original map and the simplest place to learn an aircraft.

Dover Kent and the Strait, 1940, 58 km square

Real

The land and the sea floor, from public elevation data: the White Cliffs, the Downs, Romney Marsh, Thanet and the Goodwin Sands are where they are, at their real size.
The three airfields are at their real sites: Hawkinge (home), Lympne and Manston, the forward fighter fields the Luftwaffe attacked in August 1940.
A Chain Home radar station on Swingate Down above Dover, where the real one stood.

Invented or simplified

Woods, towns, farmland, marsh and water come from 2018 land-cover data, not 1940's, so the towns are today's size.
Houses are generic blocks on generated streets. The roads between the towns are generated, not the real ones. Railways are not modelled, and rivers appear only where the data shows them.
Every airfield is one of three standard layouts with a north-south strip: the real fields' shape, runways and buildings are not reproduced.
The radar station is a typical Chain Home layout (steel transmitter towers, wooden receiver towers), not a survey of Swingate. The barrage balloons are placed over Dover harbour and Folkestone; their number is made up.
Left out: Dover Castle, the harbour piers and breakwaters, gun batteries and ships. The French coast is just off the map.
At the north and west edges the land fades into the sea, which is not the real coast.

Dunkirk The Dunkirk coast, 1940, 58 km square

Real

The land and the sea floor, from public elevation data: the beaches and dunes, the low polders behind them, the hills of Flanders and the sandbanks offshore.
The three airfield sites are at their real positions: Mardyck (home), Marck (Calais-Marck) and Coxyde (Koksijde).

Invented or simplified

The ships off the beaches (destroyers, steamers and small craft) and the three columns of black smoke over the port are scenery suggesting Operation Dynamo, 26 May to 4 June 1940. They are arranged, not a record of any day, and nothing can hit them.
The game treats the three fields as German; which units really flew from where is not modelled. The Allied sweep and bomber raid against them echo the RAF's 1941-44 operations, not May 1940, when the RAF was defending the beaches.
The polders, which lie below sea level, are raised to 1 m.
Left out: the Mole, the harbour piers and breakwaters, and wrecks and vehicles on the beaches.
As on the Dover map: land cover is 2018's, houses and roads are generated, the airfields are standard layouts with a north-south strip, and the land fades into the sea at the edges.

What is not modelled

Weather and night: the sun is fixed in the afternoon and the clouds are scenery. Wind. Flak, searchlights and radar. Bullets hit only aircraft (and the Combat balloons): ships, vehicles and buildings cannot be hit, and a bomb makes an explosion but damages nothing, so a Bomber raid is won by dropping the bombs on the target.

Data and credits

Land and sea-floor heights: SRTM and GMTED elevation data and sea-depth data, from the open Terrain Tiles dataset on Amazon Web Services. Land cover: CORINE Land Cover 2018, © European Union, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service 2018, European Environment Agency (EEA). The aircraft, scenery and sounds are built by the game's own code, with no downloaded models or recordings.

Paused

Display

GraphicsAuto lowers the detail when the frame rate stays low and raises it again only from this card or the menu. Full screen in flightFills the screen when you resume. Leaving full screen pauses the game.

Sound

VolumeMaster volume for the engine, wind and guns. N turns the sound off and on in flight. 100%

Mouse and stick

Mouse is the stickSteer with the pointer: move it away from the middle of the screen to roll and pull, inside a ring that shows the range. The keys still work. Not used on a touch screen. Invert pitchOff: S / ↓ and the mouse moved down pull the nose up. On: W / ↑ and the mouse moved up pull it up. A gamepad stick and the touch stick flip too.

Display

Sound

Mouse and stick

Controls

What this is

Game types

Online

Flying it

Aircraft

The maps: what is real and what is made up

Seacombe 36 km, all invented

Dover Kent and the Strait, 1940, 58 km square

Dunkirk The Dunkirk coast, 1940, 58 km square

What is not modelled

Data and credits

Paused

Display

Sound

Mouse and stick

Controls

Crashed