Airport Simulator

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Airport Simulator

Liisa Apunen. Browser. Play it here.

I crashed my first plane within 15 seconds. My second within 30. Then something clicked: drag the plane to the colored dot at the end of its matching runway, and it lands. Dragging to the wrong color does nothing. Not dragging at all means midair collisions. The game hit 852 points on Hacker News in its first three days, and after playing for an hour I understand why.

  1. The core mechanic is the same one that made Flight Control (2009) an iPhone classic: draw a path from a plane to its runway. Planes are color-coded, runways are color-coded, and the game trusts you to figure this out on your own. There are no instructions. You learn by crashing.

  2. Departing planes add the twist that makes this harder than Flight Control. Every runway periodically launches a plane that rolls across the taxiway at walking speed. You cannot control departing planes, so you have to route incoming traffic around them. The predictable congestion is the whole challenge: knowing a departure is coming and clearing the airspace for it.

  3. The difficulty ramp is well tuned: spawn rate goes from one plane every 5 seconds to one every 1.5 seconds over the first 5 minutes, and the max aircraft on screen goes from 3 to 12. The game never spikes. It just quietly becomes impossible, and you keep playing anyway because your last run was 86 landings and this one might hit 90.

  4. Built with SvelteKit and PocketBase, 3D pixel art in a pastel palette, bilingual interface (Finnish/English). The developer added a hide-scoreboard button within hours of HN feedback and cleaned the leaderboard of fake scores the same day. Responsive development.

  5. The leaderboard shows your nearest airport alongside your score, which is a nice touch. It also reveals the HN audience: someone landed 90 planes in 7 minutes and 29 seconds. That is the score to beat.

Play it if: you miss Flight Control or Mini Metro and want something that lives in a browser tab. Skip it if: the idea of managing 12 simultaneous crash vectors does not sound like fun.

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