Build story
I Fly Drones at Festivals for a Living. I Built the FPV Sim I Always Wanted in 2 Weeks With Claude.
I fly drones for a living. Not the fun kind of sentence where someone means they own a camera drone: I fly FPV at concerts and festivals through my company, Big Sky FPV. Over crowds, during drops, with the feed sometimes going straight to the LED wall behind the artist. It is the best job in the world and one of the most unforgiving. You get one take. The drop does not wait for you.
Here is the strange part: there was no way to practice any of it.
Every sim is built for a different job
FPV simulators are excellent in 2026, and every one of them is built for racing or freestyle. Gates, tracks, abandoned buildings, mountain gaps. All good things. None of them is the job I actually do, which is flying a show. Reading a stage. Threading truss without clipping a lighting rig that costs more than my car. Timing a dive so it lands exactly on the drop, because at a festival the music is not background, the music is the whole point.
I wanted a sim where the show fights back. Where the crowd moves. Where the pyro goes when the track says it goes. Nobody was going to build that for a niche inside a niche, so it was going to have to be me, and I am a pilot, not a game studio.
Two weeks with an AI team
I built the first playable version in about two weeks of nights and weekends, and Claude Code wrote most of it. I know how that sentence sounds. I would have rolled my eyes a year ago too.
The loop was simple: I described what flying actually feels like, Claude wrote the systems, I flew the result and told it what was wrong. The first flight model was airborne on day one. Making it feel honest took hundreds of small corrections that only a pilot would ask for: how a cinewhoop washes out in a tight turn, how throttle authority changes in prop wash, what your eyes do when the strobes hit.
Some of what is under the hood, because builders always ask: it is a single file build on three.js, physics run at a fixed substep so replays are deterministic, the test suite is up around 1,500 checks with a headless browser rig on top of it that drives the real page, and any USB transmitter that shows up as a game controller works straight from the page. An AI wrote most of that code. A working pilot signed off on every stick feel decision. That combination is the entire product.
What came out the other side
FPV Festival Simulator runs free in your browser. No download, no account wall before your first flight, no gaming PC required.
Load any MP3 and the entire show reacts to it. Lighting follows the build. Pyro hits the kick. Cryo fires on the drop. The crowd moves with your track. Fly the same stage to two different songs and you have flown two different shows.
There is a line of sight trainer, because flying what you can see instead of what the camera sees is the skill most pilots never drill and every real gig eventually demands. RadioMaster and most USB radios work in the browser. Keyboard works if that is what you have tonight.
The Mainstage and the LOS trainer are free forever. Everything else is one payment: $9.99 unlocks every venue in the game, including every venue we ship from here on. That is the whole business model, and I would rather it be boring and honest than clever.
Why I am telling you how it was made
Because the barrier just moved, and people should know. A year ago this project needed a team I could not hire and a timeline I could not afford. Instead it took one pilot who knew exactly what the thing should feel like, and an AI that could build fast enough to keep up with the picture in my head.
If you have a niche you know deeply and a tool you wish existed, the gap between you and a shipped product is smaller than it has ever been. Mine happened to involve lasers.
Fly it
Open the link. Fly the Mainstage. Load a track you love and wait for the drop. Then come tell me what feels wrong on the sticks, especially if you fly events for real, because pilot feedback is what built this and pilot feedback is what ships next.