Helicopter Turn Simulator

Pilots and instructors talk about the difference between an "orbit" (constant airspeed through the air mass) and a "turn around a point" (constant ground track), but the power penalty for the second when wind is present is hard to feel without running the math. Existing visualizations focus on path geometry and ignore the cost. The aim here was to make the torque demand quantifiable on a circular gauge instead of describing it in prose.

Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript ES modules. No frameworks, no build step. The simulation engine combines ground speed with wind vectors at each point in the turn, derives bank angle and load factor for the radius, and decomposes total power into induced, profile, parasite, and maneuvering components using simplified rotor aerodynamics. Six helicopter presets ship: R22, R44, Bell 206, Bell 407, AS350/H125, and the UH-60. Up to four simulations can run side by side for comparison.

Pair-authoring with Claude on a domain Claude doesn't have strong priors on (rotorcraft power calculations) worked best when I framed each iteration as "here's what a pilot expects to see, here's the formula it should match." The model was good at the rendering and UI plumbing but needed me to validate every coefficient against a published source.