F-22 Landing Challenge Game
Grease it. Hold centerline. Beat the crosswind. Twenty seconds on short final, a gusty crosswind doing its best to ruin your day. The Daily Challenge is a five-level run — five real US airports, difficulty ramping 1★→5★ — for a grand total out of 50,000. New run every day at 0000Z, the same five for every pilot on the planet.
← → or A/D steer · hold ↓ (or S) to flare — nose up · ↑ (or W) pushes the nose down. Use the joystick — push forward for nose down, pull back to flare (nose up), left/right to steer. 20 seconds per approach. For fun and awareness only — not flight instruction.
Leaderboard
Ranked by grand total across all five levels.
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How to play the crosswind landing game
1. Read the wind
Every scenario briefs a real airport, a real runway with its true heading, and a METAR-style wind. Check the crosswind component and which side it's from before you fly.
2. Hold centerline
On short final the wind shoves you sideways — gusts included. Feed in correction (arrow keys, A/D, or hold either side of the screen) to keep the runway centerline under you. Smooth beats frantic: the score watches your whole approach. And from 3★ up, watch for geese — they're somewhere different on every attempt, and a small pitch change dodges them; take one on the windshield and you fly the rest of the approach looking through the splat.
3. Flare in the last ~15 feet
Hold ↓ (or the FLARE button) to raise the nose and break the descent in roughly the last 15 feet — ↑ pushes the nose down if you need to steepen. Pull too early and you float past the zone; too late and the ramp crew hears it.
4. Grease it — then prove it
Touch down soft, centered, in the touchdown zone, with no side drift. Enter your three initials, hit the daily leaderboard, and send your score card to your hangar group chat.
Scoring, explained — what makes a good crosswind landing
The score rewards exactly what a checkride examiner watches: touchdown point, centerline, sink rate, side-load, and whether the whole approach was stable or a rescue mission.
| Component | Max | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Centerline accuracy | 3,000 | Distance from the centerline at touchdown. Painted-on-the-stripe pays the most; 35 ft off pays nothing. |
| Touchdown zone | 2,000 | Peaks at the CENTER of the zone (~1,000 ft past the threshold) — time your flare so you settle right on it. Points taper toward the zone edges and fall off fast short or long. |
| Sink rate | 2,000 | 120 fpm or less at touchdown is a full-credit greaser. 720 fpm scores zero — and your virtual passengers file complaints. |
| Alignment | 1,000 | Sideways drift at the moment of touchdown — the side-load your virtual landing gear absorbs. Under 1 ft/s is perfect. |
| Stability | 1,000 | RMS deviation across the whole approach. Rewards smooth continuous correction, not a last-second lunge for the centerline. |
| Wind bonus | +1,000 | Scales with the crosswind component and gust spread — and with how well you actually landed. A botched landing banks no wind points. |
Hard failures override everything: leave the pavement and it's a Runway Excursion (zero points, grass stains); land short or float past 3,000 ft and the only honest grade is Go Around Recommended.
Crosswind landing technique, briefly
Real crosswind landings come down to two jobs the game distills: kill the drift and land aligned. Pilots do it with one of two techniques — or, most commonly, a blend.
The crab.Point the nose into the wind just enough that your track runs straight down the extended centerline, like a ferry crabbing across a river. It's comfortable and stable all the way down final — but touch down still crabbed and the tires hit moving sideways. That side-load is what the game's alignment score (and the "Side Load Special" grade) is measuring. In the airplane, you "kick out" the crab with rudder in the flare.
The wing-low sideslip. Drop the upwind wing into the wind with aileron and hold the nose straight with opposite rudder. The bank cancels the drift, the rudder keeps you aligned, and you touch down on the upwind main wheel first. It demands more finesse — and in a strong gusty wind, a firm grip.
Gusts change the math.A wind reading 15G25 isn't a 15-knot problem — the gust factor means your correction is right one second and wrong the next, which is why gusty days demand continuous small corrections (and why the game's stability score rewards them). Many pilots add half the gust factor to their approach speed for exactly this reason.
Know your number.Every aircraft has a maximum demonstrated crosswind component in the POH — around 15 knots for a Cessna 172. It's not a hard limitation, but it's a well-earned hint. Before any windy approach, compute the actual component with our crosswind calculator (it works on live METARs), decode the raw report with the METAR & TAF decoder, and check your field's live winds on its airport page. Real pilots don't guess — they monitor.
F-22 Landing Challenge Game FAQ
Is this a real flight simulator?
No — it's a 20-second arcade challenge built around one real skill: tracking centerline in a gusty crosswind and timing the flare. Real runway geometry and realistic wind physics, deliberately simple controls. For actual crosswind technique, grab a CFI and a windy day.
How is the landing score calculated?
Each landing is scored out of 10,000 in six parts: centerline accuracy (3,000), touchdown zone (2,000), sink rate (2,000), alignment (1,000), approach stability (1,000), plus a wind-difficulty bonus (up to 1,000) that scales with how well you landed. The full breakdown appears after every landing. A daily run is five landings, so the run leaderboard is out of 50,000.
What's a good crosswind landing score?
Anything over 8,000 is a solid landing. 9,000+ means you held centerline in wind and greased the touchdown — leaderboard territory. A perfect 10,000 requires a near-flawless landing on a maximum-crosswind day, and nobody's done it yet.
What is a crosswind component?
The portion of the wind blowing across the runway rather than down it. Wind 30° off the runway heading puts about half its speed across the runway; at 90° all of it is crosswind. Our crosswind calculator computes it for any runway and wind, including gusts.
Does the game use real airports and weather?
The airports and runways are real — 70 major US airports with surveyed true runway headings, lengths, and widths. Winds are generated to match each level's difficulty, and the daily run's airports and winds are identical for every player worldwide — the geese, clouds, and rain move around on every attempt, though. A live-METAR mode that flies the actual current wind is on the roadmap.
Can I play on my phone?
Yes — hold the left or right side of the screen to correct, hold the FLARE button to raise the nose and flare. No download, no signup.
What's the Daily Challenge?
A five-level run: five featured airports and winds, difficulty ramping from gentle (1★) to brutal (5★), the same for every player and resetting at 0000 Zulu. The weather ramps with it — clouds build on 4★, and 5★ adds rain streaking the windscreen and a cloud sitting right on final. Fly all five in one sitting — you get each level's score plus a running total, and the leaderboard ranks by your grand total out of 50,000. Finish a run each day to keep your streak alive.
What are the geese?
Levels 3★ and up add a bird hazard: a lone Canada goose crossing final on 3★ and 4★, and on 5★ a flock of three that ambushes you head-on out of a cloud. Their timing and position are random on every single attempt — no two approaches are the same, so scan ahead the whole way down. They never change your score directly (the daily leaderboard stays fair), but hit one and it splats across the windshield (blood, feathers, the works) and you fly the rest of the approach looking through it. Dodge with a small pitch input — down a little or up a little — before it reaches you. Real-world tie-in: most bird strikes happen below 500 ft AGL, exactly where you're flying.
How do pilots actually handle crosswind landings?
Two techniques: crab into the wind down final and kick it straight with rudder just before touchdown, or wing-low — aileron into the wind with opposite rudder, touching the upwind wheel first. Most pilots crab down final and transition to a slip in the flare. The education section below goes deeper.
About this data
Airports and runways come from the public OurAirports dataset — surveyed true headings, lengths, and widths for 70 major US airports, the same data behind ATIS Alerts' 2,100+ live airport pages. Scenario winds are generated per difficulty band (daily scenarios are identical for all players); crosswind components use the same math as our crosswind calculator. Landing physics are simplified for play. Built by ATIS Alerts, a product of The Better Travelers, LLC.
The wind doesn't wait for your next round
Real pilots monitor changing conditions. ATIS Alerts messages you on Telegram when your airport's wind, ATIS, ceiling, or flight category changes — METARs, D-ATIS, TAFs, and FAA delays, watched around the clock. Free for your home field.
More tools: F-18 carrier landing game · crosswind calculator · density altitude calculator · METAR & TAF decoder · airport status widget · live FAA delays board