I was tasked with designing and creating a webapp for trainee pilots at Leading Edge Aviation, a flight school based in London Oxford Airport. The final product was a simulator accessible through a tablet computer; it trains students on the operation of a plane’s Multifunction Control and Display Unit (MCDU), a complex and crucial device, often used for programming flight plans before takeoff.

I had to familiarise myself with this highly specialist piece of technology, and built an emulator of the device’s main interface. I built an adjacent editor app which allowed me to easily recreate the numerous “pages” that pilots can navigate through.

Alongside the emulator I developed an educational system for teaching and practicing operation of the MCDU. The app generates a randomised, realistically formatted flight plan, and can present layered instructions for each step of inputting key plan information. The trainee can also be tested without instructions – at the end of the process the performance is rated based on accuracy and time.

I began this project with no prior knowledge of the specialist field; through in-depth research I gained enough understanding to apply my technical design and implementation skills to the solution. The app itself was developed with HTML, JS and CSS, including the creation of systems to generate and parse custom JSON data structures.