One in three people think they could land a plane.

With no training, almost certainly not. Landing is the fastest and most precise part of a flight, and the two things that go wrong first are the two this game models: getting slow and pulling the nose up to fix it, or coming in too fast to stay on the runway. Air traffic control can talk you through the radio and the airport, but they can't fly the airplane, and a passenger jet is a lot less forgiving than the trainer here.

It's the skill student pilots spend the most hours on. Instructors report students taking anywhere from six to 40 hours of lessons before they're allowed to land alone, and the first solo is a milestone because landing is the hard part. In this game the airplane starts trimmed on final with the hard parts taken out: no wind, no flaps, no rudder and a long runway, and it is still hard. If you land it you can try again with a crosswind, and the bank and rudder to deal with it.

Airspeed, same as on real approaches. People see the runway getting close, get nervous and pull the nose up. The airplane slows down, the wing stalls, the nose drops and it lands short. The tower's first line is the rule that prevents it: the nose sets your speed and the throttle sets your descent.

Two in basic mode. On a phone, tilt for the nose and slide the lever under your left thumb for the throttle. On a keyboard, the arrow keys are the nose and W and S are the throttle. The nose sets your airspeed. The throttle sets whether you climb or descend at that speed. There is no rudder, flaps, gear or wind. Real airplanes have all of those, and the game leaves them out on purpose. Advanced mode adds bank, rudder and a wind you pick. On a phone, tilt sideways to bank and use the slider under your right thumb for the rudder. On a keyboard, A and D bank and Q and E are the rudder. The wind pushes you sideways. Lower a wing into it to stop the drift and hold the nose straight with the rudder, which is how a real crosswind landing works. Touch down crabbed, drifting or with a wing too far down and the gear folds.

Touch down in the first two thirds of the runway, sinking less than about 600 feet a minute, with the nose wheel off the ground and the wings close to level. That's a generous window on purpose. A firm arrival still counts, and so does a fast one, though the card will tell you it used a lot of runway. There's no speed limit, because speed doesn't break the airplane. It floats you past the touchdown zone, and that's the failure you get instead. Stall it, hit short, hit hard, land nose first, float past the zone, fly away or run out of time, or in advanced mode land on the grass or sideways, and the result card tells you which one you did.

No. It's a small, simplified flight model of a 172-class trainer. Lift, drag, thrust and weight are real, the stall happens for the reason a real wing stalls, and the airspeed and altitude on screen come from that model. It is a small game built to teach one idea, and nothing here counts toward a certificate.

The FAA minimum for a private pilot certificate is 40 flight hours. Examiner data from thousands of checkrides puts the typical Part 61 student closer to 72 hours, and most of that gap is landings, because they take repetition. Our estimator prices the hours students actually fly, at the rates flight schools publish.