Flight Sim Planes

There are as many flight sim planes in the gaming world as there are planes in the world.  Maybe even more because I saw a guy flying a UFO once on Microsoft Combat. (Really, I did.)  The thing is, there are many types of planes to choose from in the world of flight sims.

Jets and Prop Planes

For those of us who are combat minded things can be broken down into distinct types of combat flight sims: jets and prop planes.

Jets

The jet jock loves to fly fast, hit the afterburners and light up the skies with his missiles and the like.  While it is great to enjoy the speed and danger associated with going “Mach 3 with your hair on fire,” killing your targets from 3 miles out isn’t the cup that some people want to use when pouring tea.

Prop Planes

The prop fighter loves to get his hands a little dirty and go “guns up” and get his kills in close. The hallmark of this type of sim has got to be ACM; Air Combat Maneuvering.  Half Cubans, rolling left then breaking right, ducking, jinking and ditching… oh yeah, this is what it is about. These guys generally have a little “online swagger” about them that the jet jocks lack. Who can blame them? When you are an online Chuck Yeager you can do what you want, ya know?

Commercial Planes

The other flight sims are the commercial ones (yawn). These can actually be more fun than I used to think. Once you get over the lack of adrenaline, they are very challenging. Taking a Boeing 777 off the runway and to Angels 30, finding and then maintaining the proper altitude is pretty intense stuff.

These do not handle like an F-4 Phantom. With some of these sims you can do things no one really wants to do in real life, like file a flight plan and then deviate from it. Unlike real life where you run the risk of having a couple of fast movers flying up your tailpipe. That’s too bad too, because the game play then would get really interesting.

Physics Engine

Whatever your taste in planes, there is some sort of flight simulator plane that will fit your bill.  The main thing about the planes has to be the physics engine. The physics engine is the part of the program that decides how an airplane will react in flight.

Some sims offer the option to use a “relaxed realism” setting which will let you put your TWA passengers going from London to New York on a “vomit comet” or allow you to do incredible aerobatics that would otherwise be impossible.

The main thing to remember when researching flight sims isn’t necessarily the graphics. Graphics, though important, do very little to enhance the realism of your flight sim plane. If you can turn a Cessna up on one wing at Angels 45 and hammerhead into a 44,000 ft dive and pull out of it. Yeah, you see my point? Still, who wants to auger** all the time either?

Definition of Auger

** Auger: n. A piece of farm equipment used to drill post holes or a dumb act by an “online aviator” resulting in the pilot being “pre-buried.”

Syn:  lawn dart, bite dust, crash n burn, pancake into the green