Civil Flight Simulations in the 1990’s

AboutRob "Bomber" Henderson remembers: "A320 AIRBUS by Thallion : This was bar far the most complex civilian flight sim I flew on the Amiga. It was developed in conjunction with the airline LUFTHANSA of Germany. The sim came with a huge manual, a massive "notepad" containing Jeppessen airfield approach charts for almost every controlled airfield in Central Europe, and 4 high level navigation charts, and a massive poster of a real A320 cockpit."

AboutIt adds Amelia Aerhart’s aircraft, the Lockeed Electra, and scenery all along the route of her last, unfinished flight of 1937.

AboutAustralian scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 98. | Scans to process

AboutBuzz Aldrin's Race Into Space offers twenty different approaches to the moon. Do you follow history or do you cut your own path to glory? Will the United States land on the moon first? Or will the Russians continue to dominate space and plant the red flag on lunar soil first?

About"You can fly 5 aerobatic planes and gliders . Your missions are only to learn the art of flying and aerobatic figures during 30 lessons. You can also participate in 50 flying races. The ground details are beautiful compared to the other sims of this year, due to its ImageScaping technology. Flight models are well designed (and crashes too!)" MiGMan thanks Vincent Jamart for these recollections.

AboutStunning landscape and weather complemented by ATC and realistic physics made this a high watermark in civil flight sims.

About"The FlightGear Flight Simulator project is a free, open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight sim development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License. The FlightGear project is working to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for the development and pursuit of interesting flight simulator ideas. We are developing a solid, basic sim that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing."

AboutA detailed civil flight sim which needs a fairly powerful machine to run at full graphic settings and should see a lot of expansion with added scenery packs.

AboutRory Geoghan reminded me about this great little sim. It's a good way to kill 10 minutes and you can run it with the keyboard. "The Merlin Helicopter Challenge was developed for use by the Royal Navy for recruitment purposes. We gratefully acknowledge their permission to release Merlin to the general public. If you would like further details on careers in the Royal Navy, please contact your local recruitment office."

AboutThe default aircraft include an Ultralight, Hanglider and Sailplane. The open architecture and realistic physics of the sim has encouraged a plethora of add-ons such as Helicopters, World War I aircraft, more Ultralights, Cessnas, - a flying car! - kit planes, recreational vehicles and even a bicycle!

AboutPro Pilot was a civil aviation sim released in 1997 by Sierra. I bought a copy in 2000. In 2001 I finally got around to trying it out for the museum and scanned the box contents, admired the manual and checklists then realised there was no CDROM in the box! .. no wonder it was on sale! You win some, you lose some.

About"YSFlight is a free, open-source multi-platform flight simulator, developed and published by Soji Yamakawa since 1999. Since its initial release, it has received annual updates, with the most recent stable version released in 2018." - Wikipedia