Flightgear third party aircraft software#

Installing FlightGear is actually quite simple. Or you can spend months or even years fine tuning your own creation until it’s perfect.

Flightgear third party aircraft software#

For now it’s enough to know that just because you’re not happy with the way one FDM engine handles then there’s others to try.Įverything there on from the 3d Models, sounds, textures and scripts required for scenery, aircraft, sounds and functionality can be coded in entirely free software and in an open way with many contributors across the community if you want. Not content with just a standard Flight Dynamics Model (FDM) Engine there’s actually 6 to choose from by “standard” and the ability to write your own if you really fancy but the most recently publicly updated and supported are called YASim and JSBSim, both do things a little differently and have very different applications but we’ll cover that in later articles. Anyone can contribute and sometimes that means that things aren’t always released when they are finished but more put out into the community for others to have a go at finishing and adding their own touches as the aircraft or whatever else it may be, goes on. A poorly finished aircraft and scenery that you wouldn’t call groundbreaking (excuse the pun) well that’s again down to the nature of open source. You might say, quite validly, that you’ve tried FlightGear and you got anything but that.

It’s entirely cross platform so regardless of your chosen Operating System you shouldn’t have any problems running it. The whole ethos of the FlightGear project is to have a complex simulation with the emphasis on being able to create very realistic scenarios and flight models for not only enjoyment but also as an engineering and pilot training tool. The thing that attracts most people to FlightGear is the fact it is Open source which means a lot more than it just being free. FlightGear is an Open-Source flight simulator which has been an active project since 1996 and initially released in 1997 - In that nearly 20 year history a lot has changed.