I’ve always had a special place in my heart for flight simulators. In fact, one of my favorite programs on my Apple II+ (ahem, back in the day) was, ironically, the original Microsoft Flight Simulator. Still one of my fondest early computing memories. I spent hours flying around virtual skies.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Microsoft doesn’t make its Flight Simulator available for Mac these days. There are, however, a couple of spiffy options available.

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X-Plane (Laminar Research, $50 DVD) is arguably the current best program in the Mac OS X flight sim field and comes bundled with the Linux and Windows versions all on one disk. Its flight dynamics are pretty amazing tech, as are some of the automated scenery generation routines, based on real-world terrain maps. With the full scenery disk, you can literally go to any airport on Earth (not to mention Mars!) and see some fairly okay facsimile of reality. However, do not expect to necessarily see any recognizable building landmarks in the default installation. The autogen buildings do a serviceable job of creating a cityscape, but you won’t look out your window and gape as you fly past the Hollywood sign.

There is also justifiable criticism of X-Plane being in perpetual beta, and since the company that makes it basically consists of one rather easily distracted developer, at times you’ll find some strange new features crop up (hot air balloons, anyone?) while important bugs languish unsquashed.

Even still, the $50 price tag is worth the ride, and there is a large community of content developers surrounding the product — see X-Plane.org for lots of cool 3rd-party stuff. Other X-Plane resources:

• X-Plane.org Forums - see the screenshots threads for some cool shots
• FSImp plugin for X-Plane - reportedly enables the use of Microsoft Flight Simulator scenery in X-Plane, but is only for Windows at this point.
• FreeWorld Airways - …Virtual airline built around the flight simulator X-Plane. Our aim is to give X-Plane users a highly realistic flying experience, simulating real-world airline operations for pilots who appreciate doing it just right.
• Global Scenery

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FlightGear (free) is a open-source flight sim released under the GPL, available for the major platforms. This paragraph does a good job of describing the philosophy behind the project:

The idea for FlightGear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The FlightGear project is striving to fill these gaps.

As with many open-source projects, there is still a lot of roughness around the edges (polish is one thing that full-blown commercial projects often have in spades), but the core important work has been done. I haven’t had the chance to mess around with FlightGear much yet, apart from sitting on the SFO runway and attempting to guess the controls — not the best method I realized as I began to taxi off the side of the runway. :) More on this later. There appears to be lots of potential, but it takes some poking around to find out what’s going on.

With both of the above programs, you won’t find much of a standard Mac OS X look and feel, partly out of the necessities of their cross-platform nature. However, if you can put aside the lack of polish (and landmarks), there is a lot of fascinating flight fun to be had.

See you in the skies!