01
Mission setup
Pick the aircraft card, scenario, camera lock, and optional autonomy upload before launch.
Boom.
Dock with confidence.
A browser refueling boom simulator: passive visible / thermal sensing, ECEF boom commands, and replayable mission profiles for day, night, water, land, and EMCON.
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Problem
Why a refueling boom exists
Fighter jets often need fuel without flying back to a runway — tankers carry that fuel in the air.
The boom is the long, operator-steered arm that links the tanker to the receiving jet so fuel can flow at altitude.
The geometry is unforgiving: closure rate, lateral offset, and vertical alignment all have to stay inside a tight envelope while both aircraft keep moving.
Air Mobility Command's Aug. 25, 2025 release summarized KC-46 boom mishaps from Oct. 15, 2022, Nov. 7, 2022, and Aug. 21, 2024 where nozzle binding, excessive closure, and instability damaged the boom and tanker during refueling attempts.
Night, open water, and EMCON make the perception and alignment problem even harder.
Live training is costly, weather-dependent, and hard to repeat on demand.
Software rehearsal should mirror that exact spatial challenge — approach, passive sensing, alignment, closure management, and safety logic — without replacing certified instruction.
Practice the geometry before the boom hits metal.
Boom puts the 3D scene, passive visible / thermal sensor view, uploadable autonomy perturbations, mission profile controls, and post-run analytics in one place so teams can rehearse the exact offsets and closure trends that matter.
Boom
Refueling dock sim
Live panel
Check out the live panel readout.
The board below shows status text, a tiny camera view, and where you are in the sequence (for example search, align, dock). The values update in real time in your browser from the same run as the frozen capture above—not a prerecorded clip.
Guidance
Search · passive multispectral track
Nominal
Err 0.00 m|Conf 0%
Passive visible / thermal handoff · Tail Acquire Left
visible
Tail L
Track unavailable
Track confidence0%
Controller states (left → right)
Search
Acquire
Track
Align
Insert
Docked
Hold
Abort
Breakaway
Telemetry
Boom pose, errors, commands
T+0.0s
Pos err0.000 m
Lat err0.000 m
Fwd err0.000 m
Closure0.000 m/s
Mate score0.0 %
Sensor modeTail Acquire Left · visible
Track roleacquire · 0 active
Disagree0.000 m
Track rng0.00 m
Yaw0.000 rad
Pitch0.000 rad
Extend5.80 m
moveECEFmoveECEF(0.0, 0.0, 0.0) cm
Cmd mag0.0 cm
Yaw rate0.000 rad/s
Pitch rate0.000 rad/s
Ext rate0.000 m/s
Fused conf0 %
Dropouts0
Visible0.0 s
Safety + emission state
Within envelope · no holds
Pipeline
Four steps.
From setup to replay — the path the sim walks.
02
Passive track
Visible + thermal acquisition and terminal sensors fused into one geometry-first receptacle track.
03
Control + safety
Staged controller, `moveECEF(...)` autopilot commands, and hold / abort / breakaway logic.
04
Debrief
Compare baseline, uploaded, and overlay replays with offset, closure, confidence, and safety analytics.
Stack
Under the hood.
- RuntimeBun, Next.js App Router, TypeScript.
- 3DReact Three Fiber, drei, capped DPR.
- StateZustand for sim + UI.
- PerceptionPassive visible / thermal sensor suite + fused receptacle tracking.
- SafetyECEF autopilot commands, limits, hold / abort / breakaway logic.
- Autonomy evalClient-side upload worker, overlay replay, and post-run offset analytics.
- SavelocalStorage summaries + IndexedDB replay archives.
Math + physics
The project in plain English.
This sim is about relative motion, not magic. The hard part is keeping a moving boom and a moving receptacle aligned while perception gets noisy and the safe closure window stays narrow.
Geometry
The controller is always solving relative position: where the boom tip is, where the receptacle is, and what offset remains in lateral, vertical, and forward axes.
Control
Desired boom-tip motion becomes `moveECEF(...)` commands, then inverse kinematics and rate limits turn that into yaw, pitch, and extension changes the plant can actually follow.
Safety
Closure spikes, disagreement between passive tracks, and keep-out violations trigger hold, abort, or breakaway before the controller keeps pushing into a bad intercept.
Try it
Open the sim.
Runs in the browser — fullscreen works best for flying the boom.
Boom