Wingman

REAL
first person view
dashboard
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Inspiration

"This summer, my flight instructor asked me to use a flight simulator to practice my landings. The problem is most flight sims are expensive, and they feel more like games than something you'd actually train on. The real trainers are too expensive to use, so we decided to make an easily accessible, realistic, flight simulator with student pilots in mind." - someone on the team

Wingman was inspired by our teammate’s experience being asked by a flight instructor to practise landings at home, only to find a gap between consumer flight sims and costly training systems. We set out to make realistic, guided practice more accessible to student pilots.

What it does

Wingman pairs a homemade flight controller with realistic flight physics, real-time AI coaching, and post-flight feedback to help beginners practise flying fundamentals.

How we built it

We built a 3D-printed controller with an Arduino and MPU6050 motion sensor, then connected it to a simulator powered by Python, JSBSim, CesiumJS, and a lightweight machine-learning model.

Challenges we ran into

Warped prints, limited parts, soldering issues, and a last-minute switch from ESP32 to Arduino challenged us to keep adapting our design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We combined custom hardware, flight simulation, and AI coaching into one prototype with an estimated controller parts cost of under $35 CAD.

What we learned

Impressive features only go so far, only until your users actually are properly onboarded are those features truly valuable.

What's next for Wingman

Rudder petals, new controller prototypes, even cheaper devices, ESP32 based chip rather than Arduino, different types of aircraft (e.g. sailplanes, different models/manufacturers), different locations.

Built With

Submitted to

Hack the Skies 2026
- Winner First Place Prize

Created by

soldered and wired the hardware controls, connected them to the sim, built the 3D models, and set up the database (Supabase Postgres with row-level security)

Jayden Fu
worked on the 3d model, worked on hardware, soldering, graphics, video editing, and prod design.

Cheney Chen
Gr12 Student at St. Theresa of Lisieux CHS
main sw, db, hw, prod design

Eric Hu
I built the software side of the flight simulator. That includes the realistic Cessna 172 flight behaviour, the approach into Toronto's Billy Bishop airport, and the cockpit instruments. It also includes the AI instructor, a small AI model trained on thousands of simulated practice landings. It watches your approach, predicts how the landing will end, gives you live tips, and tells you in green what you're already doing well. After you land it scores the landing and says what to practise next. I also built the instructor dashboard for reviewing each flight, a demo mode where the plane flies a perfect approach by itself, and the connections that let the iPad (throttle and rudder) and a phone (as the joystick) fly the plane.

Neil Moudgil
product design, building and designing the electronics within the control column, designed feedback mechanism throughout landing

Justin Wu