Fly Over Iceland

Play now — it’s free

What you actually do

You fly. There is no score and nothing to unlock. Take off above Skógafoss, climb over the Eyjafjallajökull ice cap, follow a glacial river to the coast, then drop to fifty metres and buzz the surf. Pick your plane and its paint in the hangar first — there are five, from a 1916 biplane to a small airliner.

Other people flying the same region show up as real planes with their own callsigns, and a few AI pilots keep the sky occupied when it is quiet. Fly into the glowing portal and you warp to the next region.

Where you can fly

Each region is a 30 × 30 km slice of real Iceland. They are separate worlds rather than one continuous country — that is the trade that keeps the terrain at 2-metre detail instead of a blurry whole-island mesh.

• 
  Skógafoss & Eyjafjallajökull

  The classic south coast — Skógafoss and the volcano that grounded Europe in 2010

  Peaks to 1705 m · Skógafoss

• 
  Reykjanes Eruption Zone

  The peninsula that keeps erupting — Fagradalsfjall, Sundhnúkur and Grindavík

  Peaks to 464 m · Reykjanes

• 
  Jökulsárlón & Öræfajökull

  The iceberg lagoon under Iceland's highest peak (2,110 m)

  Peaks to 2178 m · Iceland’s glaciers

• 
  Hornstrandir

  Sea cliffs and arctic-fox country at the Westfjords' northern tip

  Peaks to 779 m · Westfjords hikes

• 
  Gullfoss & Geysir

  The Golden Circle's heavyweights — Gullfoss and the geyser that named them all

  Peaks to 1074 m · Gullfoss

• 
  Landmannalaugar

  Rhyolite mountains in every colour rock can manage

  Peaks to 1339 m · Highland hikes

• 
  Snæfellsjökull & Kirkjufell

  The glacier Jules Verne dug through, plus Iceland's most photographed mountain

  Peaks to 1489 m · Snæfellsnes hikes

• 
  Mývatn & Krafla

  Volcanic lake country — pseudocraters, Dimmuborgir and the Krafla fires

  Peaks to 1076 m · Mývatn nature baths

• 
  Dettifoss & Ásbyrgi

  Europe's most powerful waterfall and the horseshoe canyon downstream

  Peaks to 761 m · Dettifoss

• 
  Vestmannaeyjar

  The Westman Islands — a volcano buried a town here in 1973

  Peaks to 346 m · Hot springs

• 
  Dynjandi & Arnarfjörður

  The Westfjords' biggest waterfall, fjord after fjord after fjord

  Peaks to 981 m · Dynjandi

• 
  Askja & Holuhraun

  A caldera deep in the highlands — Apollo astronauts trained here

  Peaks to 1584 m · Highland hikes

• 
  Eyjafjörður & Akureyri

  Iceland's longest fjord, all the way down to the capital of the north

  Peaks to 1278 m · North Iceland

• 
  Skaftafell

  Waterfall valley below Vatnajökull — trail-flyover prototype (tight bbox for close-up detail)

  Peaks to 527 m · Skaftafell hikes

How we built it

The whole thing is one static page of plain JavaScript modules and Three.js — no game engine, no build step, nothing to install.

The ground is real elevation data

Each region starts as ArcticDEM 2-metre elevation from the Polar Geospatial Center (CC-BY 4.0), pulled straight out of cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs on AWS and clipped to a 30 km box. That becomes a heightmap that displaces a million-vertex mesh, with Esri World Imagery draped over it. No vertical exaggeration — when the altimeter says 1,500 m, that is 1,500 m.

Rivers and waterfalls come from OpenStreetMap, not guesswork

We first tried detecting water from the satellite imagery by colour. It does not work in Iceland: glacial rivers are bright milky grey, so any “dark and blue” test misses every one of them, while wet lava and cliff shadow get flagged as water. So the pipeline asks OpenStreetMap instead and rasterises the real river network, lakes included. Waterfalls are real waterway=waterfall nodes with their real names and heights — Skógafoss stands at its true 60 m.

The towns are real too

Building footprints come from OpenStreetMap and are turned into oriented boxes with pitched roofs. Akureyri is 6,000 buildings on its actual street grid, drawn in two calls to the graphics card.

Multiplayer with no server

Planes broadcast their position five times a second over Supabase Realtime. There is no database, no matchmaking and no login: you get an Icelandic callsign, everyone in your region hears you, and each plane is drawn a quarter-second in the past so the motion stays smooth between updates.

What it costs to run

Nothing per player. The terrain is static files on a CDN, the physics and rendering happen on your device, and the only running service is the realtime channel we already pay for. That is why it can stay free.