Ever dreamed of flying? No crowded streets or traffic jams,
the freedom of moving in the third dimension, way above all daily grind and earthly
worries, the endless horizon in front of you - and the technical challenge
of controlling an airplane...
In the early teenage days, I had the lucky chance to actually
take control of a small sports plane twice. The rest of the time, however, I
currently enjoy flight simulation, on PCs and - by the chance of an
absolutely staggering present - the professional "real" ones
(see here).
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For PCs (and Macs, of course :-), I can highly recommend
X-Plane by Laminar
Research. It's the most versatile and the most realistic flight simulation
I've seen -- and believe me, I've seen a lot! If you really want to fly,
forget these games like MS FlightSimulator, Flight Unlimited, Fly!,
ProPilot, and so on. Some of them are not bad at all (I especially like
the graphics of Flight Unlimited III, and, of course, the newer MS FlightSims),
but in the sum of its features, X-Plane is a class of its own. Especially
the accuracy and smoothness of the simulation, even on slower hardware,
is unmatched.
The main difference as compared to all the other flight sims is
that X-Plane actually calculates all physical effects on the airplane
in real-time. While other sims use hardcoded
data and specifically tweaked behavior for the individual airplanes
they ship with the package, X-Plane just applies the laws of physics --
on any aircraft you can image and design! Given accurate models of the
airplanes, X-Plane is as realistic as it gets! This is
one of the reasons many aircraft companies (e.g. CarterCopters,
Piper)
are using X-Plane to design and test-fly their new planes. With the
simulation performing within 1% of the airline book values, it's no
wonder that X-Plane is the first (and still the only!) consumer-priced
flight simulation to obtain the official FAA
approval for training pilots towards their Commercial Certificate,
Instrument Rating, and Airline Transport Pilot Certificate!
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Ok, maybe the standard out-of-the-box graphics
are topped by some other game or scenery pack (although there are
very nice sceneries for X-Plane as well). But X-Plane's incredible
accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage),
versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions, including real-time
weather), add-on programs (aircraft and scenery editors), user-customizability,
downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery really make it the
ultimate flight simulator for Mac and Windows PCs!
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