BlomQuest / Left Seat Lab
Left Seat Lab
Free, interactive labs for the physics of flight and the ground-school concepts every pilot has to master. Turn the airplane, twist the OBS, and see exactly what the instruments do and why.
Why labs
Some concepts don't land from a diagram in a textbook. They land when you move something and watch the result.
Learn by doing
Each lab is a small working model you control. Change one thing at a time and build the intuition that carries into the airplane.
Driven by the physics
The labs model what actually happens, so the instruments behave the way they do in flight, errors and all.
Free in the browser
Open a lab and start. There's nothing to install, and the labs work on a laptop, a tablet, or a phone.
Made for briefings
Instructors can pull a lab up on a tablet and show a student the exact situation they're talking about.
The labs
The library grows one lab at a time, starting with the topics students most often find confusing.
- Compass
Magnetic compass turning errors. See why the compass undershoots north and overshoots south in a turn.
Live - VOR
VOR interpretation. Work the OBS, the course needle, and the TO/FROM flag until reading your position is second nature.
Live - Altitude
Kinds of altitude. Indicated, pressure, density, true, and absolute, and how they relate.
In development - Weather
Temperature and wind. How non-standard temperature and wind change what you see and where you go.
In development - Turns
Physics of steep turns. Load factor, bank angle, and stall speed, together.
In development - Instruments
Instrument errors. When the panel tells you something that isn't quite true, and how to catch it.
In development
For flight schools and ground schools
Left Seat Lab is built to sit alongside a curriculum, not replace one. If you train pilots, we'd like to hear which concepts your students struggle with most.
We're interested in working with flight schools, ground-school providers, and instructors on how the labs fit into training.