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You can enjoy some basic flight simulator technology on your home computer. Even in the early days of the PC, rudimentary flight simulators were available for at-home gaming, inlcudingBruce Artwick's subLOGIC simulators, which managed to get the best out of the 8-bit machines. Flight simulator games such as Red Baron II were also the programs that pioneered many of the features found in many modern PC games, such as 3D graphics, online play, and modding.
Combat flight simulators are very popular flight simulator games for PCs. These allow a user to experience a simulated air combat operation, either from the perspective of a pilot or of a crew member (no prizes for guessing which is the more popular mode!) Civilian flight simulators are also available, but these have not got the widespread popularity of the combat flight simulation titles. One of these titles, X-Plane, was certified by the FAA for training purposes, the only one PC-based simulator to have this honour.
PC flight simulators became so realistic to the extent that some speculated that the terrorists involved in the September 11 hijacking and attacks used Microsoft Flight Simulator to train for the event. This was hotly denied by Microsoft (and is, indeed ridiculous); Microsoft, however, carefully deleted the Twin Towers off the 2002 version of their simulator, and provided a patch to do the same to earlier versions already on the market.
Some people are not content merely to fly aircraft on home PC flight simulators, but have gone to become "aircraft designers" for their favourite games. Virtual "aircraft designers" can create military or commercial airline aircraft, and can even use the names of real airlines for not-for-profit designs. Other home flight simulator users can invent a virtual airline, either based on a real airline company (e.g. Virtual Air France, Virtual Delta, Virtual Aeroflot and others) or a product of their own imagination (e.g. American Flight Airways) Modifications to a simulation are usually called "mods", with the associated gerund verb "modding." Modding adds greatly to a simulation and has allowed many simulations to expand far beyond the original concept, with new situations, content and aircraft design. To take one example, Falcon 4.0 has been expanded well beyond the original single aircraft, with hundreds of different aircraft and new warzones added to this simulation.
The online flight simulator experience involves more than flying aircraft. Online air traffic, where virtual pilots and virtual Air Traffic Controllers communicate in real time similar to real air traffic situations. The most popular online air traffic networks are VATSIM (best for virtual pilots and ATCS in the UK and North America) and IVAO, which is more suited for the rest of Europe, South America and Africa. "Rush hour" on these networks is from 1800 to 2200 GMT, and up to 900 virtual pilots and/or ATCs can be connected at any one time.
Some of the more popular civilian flight simulators for PCs include:
Flight Unlimited series of PC simulators,
FlightGear, (this includes many aircraft types and locations worldwide),
Fly!,
Microsoft Flight Simulator series, which is one of the most widely-used civilian flight simulators on the market.
X-Plane, the only flight simulator certified by the FAA for training purposes
Combat flight simulators popular for PC use include:
Aces High (MMOG),
Fighter Ace, (MMOG)
Falcon 4.0 and Falcon 4.0: Allied Force, which are extremely detailed simulations of the F-16 Fighting Falcon,
Su-27 Flanker,
IL-2 Sturmovik, one of the leading World War II flight simulators,
Lock On: Modern Air Combat, a jet combat simulator.
Combat Flight Simulator WWII Europe from Microsoft, the first of the WWII Air Combat trilogy,
B-17 Flying Fortress, a WWII B-17 Bomber simulator,
European Air War, a highly rated WWII sim,
Gunship, which simulates the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter
Battle of Britain II: Wings of Victory, which is a detailed simulation of the famous Battle of Britain,
For those looking for a more general PC flight simulator, YS Flight Simulation System 2000 is a free flight simulator containing both civilian and combat elements. Also available is GL-117, an open source action flight simulator suitable for Windows, Linux and Mac operating platorms.
Flight simulators are also available for gaming consoles, although these are rarer than PC flight simulators. Pilotwings and Pilotwings 64 are marketed by Nintendo, with Ace Combat being Playstations’s equivalents.and Much rarer but still notable are flight simulators available for various game consoles. Sky Odyssey is another console flight simulator, but this package is quite rare. Game consoles have processing limitations, which restrict their ability to simulate an environment to the level necessary for good flight simulations, and console flight simulators tend to be very basic and arcade-like. They’re fun, but because they lack the complexity of the PC-based flight sims, they are not considered “true” simulators by flight simulation purists. |
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