F-16

2 Articles

Porting A Fortran Flight Simulator To Unity3D

October 1, 2025 by 8 Comments

There’s an old saying (paraphrasing a quote attributed to Hoare): “I don’t know what language scientists will use in the future, but I know it will be called Fortran.” The truth is, there is a ton of very sophisticated code in Fortran, and if you want to do something more modern, it is often easier to borrow it than to reinvent the wheel. When [Valgriz] picked up a textbook on aircraft simulation, he noted that it had an F-16 simulation in it. In Fortran. The challenge? Port it to Unity3D.

If you have a gamepad, you can try the result. However, the real payoff is the blog posts describing what he did. They go back to 2021, although the most recent was a few months ago, and they cover the entire process in great detail. You can also find the code on GitHub. If you are interested in flight simulation, flying, Fortran, or Unity3D, you’ll want to settle in and read all four posts. That will take some time.

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Powering Your F-16 With An Arduino

November 14, 2014 by 15 Comments

What do you do when you have an F-16 sitting around, and want to have some blinking navigation lights? We know of exactly one way to blink a light, and apparently so does [Dr. Craig Hollabaugh]. When asked to help restore an F-16 for the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in New Mexico, [Craig] pulled out the only tool that should ever be used to blink navigation lights on an air superiority fighter.

[Craig]’s friend was working on getting an F-16 restored for the Nuclear Museum, and like anyone with sufficient curiosity, asked how hard it would be to get the navigation lights working again. [Craig] figured an Arduino would do the trick, and with the addition of a shield loaded up with a few mosfets, the nav lights on an old F-16 would come to life once again.

The board doesn’t just blink lights on and off. Since [Craig] is using LEDs, the isn’t the nice dimming glow you’d see turning a normal incandescent light off and on repeatedly. To emulate that, [Craig] is copying Newton’s law of cooling with a PWM pin. The results are fantastic – at the unveiling with both New Mexico senators and a Brigadier General, everything went off without a hitch. You can see the unveiling video below, along with a few videos from [Craig]’s build log.

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