Two major features were added over the past two weeks. Take-off and landing is now possible. Landing succesfully is pretty challenging though!

All updates are found in the changelog.

Landing gear

A landing gear is added to the spritesheet and animated in Phaser using tweens. Tweens are basically one liners for animating sprites. Currently the landing gear is managed automatically during the approach and take-off phase. This might as well become input driven. Extension happens at approach speeds, low altitude, below 4.000ft.

Runway

.

A second sprite is finally added to the world. A runway is added using tileSprites so that the length of the runway can be varied. The runway is stretched to the entire game width for now. There is no scenery involved yet, its just one infinitely stretching runway, perfect for testing purposes. This is the second sprite with a physics body attached to it. The sprite position is fixed to the bottom of the game world.

Take-off/landing

Take-off and landing occurs when the aircraft is on the ground (the ground phase) and basically add an extra drag component \(D_g\) to the equations of motion:

\[D_g= \mu N + D_p\]

where \(N=L-W\), the normal force, \(\mu\) some tire friction coefficient assumed uniform for all tires (Assumption), \(D_p\), parachute drag (if equiped).

An extra flight state check is performed during take-off and landing. Whenever the aircraft is in ground phase, inflight related functions are not executed (stall checks, speedlimits, g-limits, structural limits). During the take-off run, the flight state is switched to inflight whenever the aircraft is airborne, above \(VLOF\).

Impact checks are performed at touchdown:

function checkimpact() {
	if (myAircraft.body.velocity.y > 500) {
		resetplayer();
	}
	if(myAircraft.angle>20||myAircraft.angle<-20){
		resetplayer();
	}
	if (!LGLOCKED) {
		resetplayer();
	}
}

Mission

The Landing gear and Runway are demonstrated.

Briefing

The mission will start at zero altitude, standard day, mean sea level. Take-off then immediately climb out a bit, approach the runway and land. The manoeuvre:

Flight

The trajectory is displayed in the middle. At this point there is no flight data display at all. also notice that it took some time toreach landing gear extension speed and the landing roll also took some time.