Civil sims

Released in 1987, this sim must have been one of the first to support head to head play via a modem. For it's time it looked outstanding with 3 dimensional polygon choppers and scenery.

Adds the Cessna 421C Golden Eagle to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002.

727-100/200 in one of four versions with a total of 29 different liveries.

747 was a civil flight sim created for the Atom computer, running in 12K of RAM ( !!!) in 1981. To give you an idea, 12k is about the size of a small web page these days. Or a few pages of text.

200, 300 and freighter variants with an impressive selection of different airline liveries and different engine variants.

Rob "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."

A320 Pilot in Command was published by Just Flight in 2002. It added the A-320 Airbus to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 and a much more extensive avionics suite.

Adds the A-320 to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002.

"An Airbus from the "F-Lite" series, for those who want to get straight into the left seat and fly the heavies."

Acro Jet was released in 1985 on the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore Amiga and PC.

A multiplayer flight simulator board game from 1965.

A cross platform sim with gorgeous graphics and a fluid flight model. The sim ran totally fluidly on my i7 and Nvidia 1060 graphics card. Helicopter flight modelling seems well supported. A great variety of aircraft are provided in the standard fleet. The interface and load times are a marvel to behold (they are fast!). My only question remains as to the flight planning, which I found quite obscure. I'll return to that.

Popular sim which runs on multiple platforms, including mobile. "We promise you will feel like a pilot flying airliners, helicopters, fighters, gliders, historical and aerobatic aircraft in a photorealistic world! Over 10,000 real world flights, highly detailed cockpits and scenery are awaiting you."

"Puts you in complete control of your own freight company, and you'll be taking charge of operations both in the boardroom and in the cockpit. As the pilot charged with delivering the goods on time, you can decide to fly a job in multiple legs, or stop anywhere en route for refuelling or maintenance. Contend with real-world weather conditions if you want the extra challenge, and detailed Map views showing all the airports in Flight Simulator will help you keep tabs on available jobs and the locations of your bases and fleet."

Mobile airline management and career pilot sim.

A stand alone civil flight sim focussing on airliners.

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

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

Aviator was developed by Geoff Crammond, creator of the 'Grand Prix' games, Stunt Car Racer, and Sentinel, for the BBC MicroComputer in 1983.

"As the busy operator of a hangar and runway in the heart of a region like the Serengeti, there are countless ways to earn a living. As an ‘old school’ bush pilot, you must undertake challenging jobs to make the lives of both tourists and locals a lot easier. Fight bush fires, transport goods, find missing people & items, serve as a first responder & wildlife preservationist, or simply take some snapshots of archaeological finds."

Buzz 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?

Flight Instruction, Formation flying, Aerobatics, Pylon racing, this sim had it all! Despite the clunky looking graphics by today's standards, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer was an ambitious attempt to teach the basics of flight on a personal computer. Edward Lerner developed and programmed it to showcase 14 different flyable aircraft. This exhibit contains AUDIO content.

Mobile sim focussed on exciting landing scenarios.

Flight Simulator 1 was one of the first flight sims released for personal computers. A whole generation of flight sim fans were hooked for life on the wire frame graphics and the "dogfighting" in the Sopwith Camel. The graphical splendour rested mainly in the mind of the player - but it was a beginning! This was my very first exposure to flying on a personal computer and I was hooked!

Michael Woodley reported: "At the time, there were three 6502 versions of FSII. There was one for the Apple II, one for the Commodore 64 and one for the Atari 800. When the the Atari ST and Amiga were introduced (which ran the Motorolla 68000 processor), new versions were released for those machines, for the Tandy and for the MacIntosh through Microsoft. The versions of FSII for the 6502 processor DID have solid filled graphics not just wireframe."

"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.

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

"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."

A 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.

" Fly virtual reality like never before in FlyInside Flight Simulator. FlyInside Flight Simulator includes cutting-edge VR support (but works great on the desktop too), a 64-bit engine designed for modern GPUs and multi-core systems, ten high-quality stock aircraft, and an innovative scenery system! "

Adds the Boeing 747-400 to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, includes 12 versions of the aircraft.

"Become a professional pilot and rescuer. Control different helicopters, protect the city and be a part of the rescue team!"

"Become an emergency pilot and test your skills to their limits, as you sit in the cockpit of an emergency helicopter, across more than 40 challenging missions. Choose from 8 models of 'copter, each varying in size, ability and specs."

IFR was a flight sim released on the Commodore 64 in 1983 "I think you could say it turned a liability into a virtue when it called itself an IFR simulator, since it had no out the window graphics at all! It's about as IFR as you can get. It's been a long time since I flew it but I still recall it was a rather strange experience. You followed yourself on a grid, and controlled your position by taking different headings. The idea was to fly at different altitudes, slip through narrow openings, make 90 degree turns to snake your way through, and land at different "airports" (which were just locations on the grid) by landing completely blind, with descent rate at touchdown determining whether it was a landing or a crash." - Ed Brooks.

A serious contender in the relatively new area of mobile platform based flight sims. Features satellite terrain imagery, dozens of aircraft, adjustable weather, Fore Flight connections and multiplayer servers with human ATC.

The first talking ATC in a sim? Jim Bailey, Yellow Springs, Ohio wrote and published a sim for CP/M back in 1987 called "Instrument Flight". "There was also an interpreter which you could create your own scripts for to provide ATC guidance. Not a canned script, but rather the ability to request vectors on the fly and get an intercept to the localizer or request the full approach on your own. It hollered at you if you were off your altitude!"

"Touch down in the tropics and transport freight between twelve exotic islands in more than a hundred exciting missions."

"The Kitfox Speedster Series 7 by Denny Kitfox is a single engine, 2 seater, amateur built kit plane. The speedster variant of the Kitfox Series 7 line up is much like the Speedster Series 4, but with shorter wings and a faster roll rate compared to other Kitfox aircraft, to increase speed and roll rate." | "Over 4500 kits have been delivered in 42 countries."

Rory 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."

The 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!

The sequel to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, this sim added interactive ATC, dynamic 'auto-gen' scenery, terrain mesh mapped for the entire planet and all with much smoother frame rates than it's predecessor.

Also titled "A Century of Flight""or FS-9, the sim recreates important historical aircraft and flights, as well as modelling the entire globe, 20,000 airports and flight tuition. Without a doubt the most sophisticated flight simulation on the market in the first decade of the 21st century.

After a 14 year hiatus Microsoft re-envisioned their flagship IP. A combination of Bing satellite mapping, cloud storage, Azure cloud computing, photogrammetry, atmospheric physics modelling and many other bespoke software technologies have delivered a quantum leap in the flight sim experience. The next decade looks to be the best yet for flight sim fans!

This iteration of the 40 year old flight sim franchise follows the tradition of expanding possibilities and pleasures for the dedicated sim pilot as well as introducing a much wider audience to virtual aviation.

With MSFS X the series received it's usual 2 year reissue, with the now expected upgrade in both performance and features.

Martin Schweiger's "Orbiter" is a freeware space flight simulator for the PC that is fun, powerful, realistic, expandable, and educational. Based on the real science and math of orbital mechanics and atmospheric flight, it features a first-person astronaut's perspective and beautiful 3D graphics. Orbiter's developer, Dr. Martin Schweiger, has created an amazing virtual world of real and fictional spacecraft, space stations, planets, and moons. It includes a variety of spacecraft, space stations, and sample scenarios or missions.

Prepar3D kept the Microsoft Flight Sim flame alive after MS abandoned their flagship product in 2010. It expanded the base software into commercial and military markets while still allowing the personal user to keep the dream alive.

Pro 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.

"This is where it all started, looking at three dials and flying at night on a crummy TV!!!" - Julian Sallows.

One of the main contenders in the relatively new space of mobile platform based flight sims.

"... we hunched around an old IRIS 2400 Turbo playing this amazing flight simulator game from Silicon Graphics, Inc.". Modern personal computers in the 90's (were) now as powerful as graphics workstations of the 80's."

"BUILD AIRPLANES. You have the tools you'll need to bring any airplane to life. Snap parts together to build your airplane's body. Place engines to add thrust. Design and attach wings and then strap yourself into the cockpit and see how it flies." - Steam

"One of the earliest sims, SoloFlight hails from the days when the Commodore Amiga reigned king of the graphics world! The most famous thing about it was the speech synthesis, in the form of flight control guiding you through the flying, telling you to pull up your flaps, etc. and taking you through your landing routine."

"Climb into the cockpit of a military attack helicopter and take on five life or death scenarios, or make your own missions in the included level editor!" - Steam

Tribute to the classic 1985 Commodore sim.

Take on Helicopters is a civil helo sim with campaign built in the ARMA 2 engine. This sim was released in 2011 and still looks great 10 years later. The fluid feel of the flight dynamics and the immersive campaign put it into my list of all time favourites. I can only hope that Bohemia Interactive release more titles like this, they don't need to update the engine - just give us more great stories to fly through!

"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

"The Zippy Sport is a single-seat, high-wing monoplane powered by a VW engine.". An interesting looking single seater ultra-light for MSFS 2020.

Type in a flight sim from a magazine article? Yes, that was computer flight simulation in the early 1980s.