How it works
Fly uncrewed cargo jets from a 1980s office terminal, by typing. What Aviate, Navigate, Communicate does, what it’s built with, and how far along it is.
The premise
A game set in a version of the 1980s where freighters fly with no one aboard. You sit at a terminal in an airline’s operations office and fly them from there: every heading, altitude, radio frequency and flap setting is a typed command that the aircraft has to acknowledge. You talk to air traffic control, ask for clearances and read them back, coordinate the ramp, and work through emergencies such as an engine failure or a lost generator.
As you go on, you write programs in Flightline, the game’s own scripting language, to run departures, routes and whole flights across several aircraft while you supervise. The terminal teaches it in chapters, and a human still reviews anything a program is allowed to do. The office is walkable and the aircraft are fictional, starting with a 1983 twin-jet freighter. It runs natively on macOS, on DEngine, and isn’t released.
What’s included
Typed control of every system, from heading and altitude to radios, gear, flaps and individual engines
Air traffic control with clearances, readbacks, handoffs, holding and diversions
Flightline, a typed scripting language with waits on acknowledgments, event handlers and fleet-wide programs
Authored emergencies, from engine failures to electrical faults, recovered with real procedures
A walkable office and a protected first shift that teaches the job before anything counts
How it’s built
Aviate, Navigate, Communicate is built on C11, DEngine and Metal.
The repository is 86% C, 9% Python by volume.
It carries 172 commits since Oct 2026, most recently changed in Oct 2026.
How the work is done
Every project here starts as a written spec, and the spec stays the source of truth once there’s code. The repository keeps a build plan with current status, an append-only decision log of where the code departed from the plan, and a handoff document that describes where things stand, including the unfinished parts.
That’s how one person keeps this many projects moving, and it’s what this page is written from.
Current state
In development. Being worked on now.
The source is private, so the way to check what this page says is to use the product.
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