Software Gadgets

I've crashed a large number of airplanes (and one space shuttle, but that's another story) in my day. Fortunately, they were all simulated fights (and crashes). I've used a number of flight simulation programs over the years -- from primitive things that ran on my old Apple II to spiffy Windows flight simulators from Microsoft. In many ways, the open source FlightGear is most interesting of the lot I've tried. There is a lot of terrain available to crash on -- I mean fly over (3 DVDs worth and growing), a growing number of aircraft to fly, and it runs nicely on just about any modern system with a 3D graphics card -- with accurate flight physics.

From the FlightGear web site:

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

FlightGear is an open-source project. This means as long as you abide by the terms of the GPL license you may freely download and copy FlightGear. Anyway can have easy and open access to the latest development source code. Being an open-source project, we have made our file formats open and easily accessible. We support standard 3d model formats and much of the simulator configuration is controlled through xml based ascii files. Writing 3rd party extensions for FlightGear (or even directly modifying the FlightGear source code) is straightforward and doesn't require a large amount of reverse engineering. This makes FlightGear an attractive option for use in private, commercial, research, or hobby projects.

FlightGear has the ability to model a wide variety of aircraft. Currently you can fly the 1903 Wright Flyer, strange flapping wing "ornithopters", a 747 and A320, various military jets, and several light singles. FlightGear has the ability to model those aircraft and just about everything in between.

A multi player protocol is available for using FlightGear on a local network in a multi aircraft environment, for example to practice formation flight or for tower simulation purposes.

With FlightGear it is possible to choose between three primary Flight Dynamics Models. It is possible to add new dynamics models or even interface to external "proprietary" flight dynamics models.

World scenery fits on 3 DVD's. (I'm not sure that's a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world. Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

FlightGear ships with an extensive 109 page manual.

The main problem with FlightGear is there is so much there. No only so much to download, but so much to do in the simulation. The basic download for Windows is 135 megs. Fortunately, you can download just the areas of the world you are interested in flying over, you don't have to download all 12 gigs or so of world data to use the program. You can get the program and scenercy files on DVD for a fee -- and unless you have a really big pipe broadband connection, you may want to take advantage of this option if you want all the scenery -- especially as the money from sales of these DVDs goes to support FightGear and to support various charities. .

Rating: 4.5 Stars
Operating System: Windows, Linux, Solaris (sparc/x86), SGI, Mac OS X, FreeBSD
License: Open Source (GNU GPL)
Price: Free
Version Reviewed: 0.9.10
Web Site: http://www.flightgear.org/
See Screenshots