Flight mechanics you can move.
A ground-up rebuild of the aircraft flight mechanics notes — leaving the static Jupyter Book behind for a fast Astro site with genuinely interactive demos compiled from Rust to WebAssembly. The maths runs in your browser; nothing is pre-rendered.
Interactive demos
Drag the ψ / θ / φ sliders and watch the aircraft and its body-axis triad rotate in real time. The rotation matrix and quaternion are computed in Rust/WASM.
Slide the flight-path angle γ and angle of attack α to see θ = γ + α, the velocity, lift, drag, weight and thrust vectors in climb, glide and level flight — in 2D and 3D.
Sweep C_D0, k, and wing loading to see the drag polar, minimum-drag speed, and best glide angle update live.
A live 6-DoF sandbox built from real stability & control derivatives. Pick an aircraft, hand-fly it with the on-screen stick and pedals, excite the phugoid / short-period / roll / Dutch-roll / spiral modes, plot any states over time, and compare the linear model against a true nonlinear one (HS125, F-16).
A Cesium globe with real world terrain and aerial imagery: a glTF aircraft flies a climbing turn over the Swiss Alps with the camera chasing it. The foundation for mission-planning and trajectory views.
Why the rebuild?
The original notes used Jupyter Book: great for prose and equations, but the figures are baked at build time — a reader can pan a Plotly chart but can't change the physics. This version keeps the writing and equations and adds a layer of real, client-side simulation, so a student can grab a slider and build intuition directly. The aircraft 3D models and worked examples carry across from the existing repository.