The very first personal computer flight simulator was designed by a young American student called Bruce Artwick who wanted to see if computers (having then just got screens), could be used to display graphics as well as text. The ‘airplane’ was a wireframe model, and after some development evolved into Flight Simulator 2. This was a very basic flight simulator, which on the pc was displayed in what came to be known as the IBM 4-color scheme, cyan, magenta, black and white. Odd. Meanwhile the Apple computers were able to display in real colours – what luxury! Eventually colours came to the pc screen and so we had land and sky and sea – no scenery to speak of, and no sound at all apart from a sort of monotone buzz from a minute 2-3cm. in-built speaker. Later came rudimentary scenery and clouds and I recall the first attempts at clouds being just odd looking round white disks in the blue sky. Nowadays of course we have almost everything, including good weather systems, brilliant scenery and all the radio and navaids that actually exist in real life. Instruments work as they do in real life and a great many real pilots now pre-fly their flights on their computer in order to familiarise themselves with the route.

Today, after ruling the flight simulator roost for many years, true competition has arrived for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, mainly in the form of Flight Unlimited 3, and Virtual Reality’s Fly! There are others, and some have come and gone, but this short review is of Flight Unlimited 3.

The simulation seems to be less demanding than FS2000, and will happily run on a computer that maybe is not up to the demands of FS2000. The aircraft provided are excellent and include a trainer, a high performance single engine Mooney Bravo, two seaplanes and a motorised sailplane. The seaplanes are good to fly and it’s fun to ‘land’ on water. All the aircraft handle well and have good instrumentation, but although there is an executive jet there are no airliners. Also, in what is in my opinion a grave omission, there is no helicopter. The scenery is very realistic but only covers the area around Seattle in any great detail, which is another reason why it fails to meet the demands of the ‘airline’ simmers. If you have FU2 you can fly on to San Francisco, but a trip from, say, Seattle to New York, is not on. The mountains are spectacular and very detailed and following the roads and tracks through them is great fun, especially in the red Fokker D1 Tri-plane. Satellite scenery is very realistic at moderate altitudes, but becomes blurred when one gets below around 1000ft. The weather generation engine works well, and you can set up some appalling weather conditions to fly through or around if you wish. Rain and fog are most realistic and I think better than in FS2000. One of the most satisfactory functions on this simulator is the voice ATC, something Microsoft’s offering lacks. The ATC really is very good and gives a good sense of being in touch with ground controllers and other aviators. Mind you, the air traffic controller can be rather sarcastic if you make an error. To compensate perhaps there is a pleasant instructor to teach you the rudiments of the various aspects of flying, and there are many moving objects such as other aircraft, boats and cars etc. to be seen. I was disconcerted one time when I was about to land on a small airstrip in the mountains and found cows all over the runway. Sometimes the runways at the smaller airfields seem far too narrow to be realistic. Flying at dusk is wonderfully true to life, with lights seeming to glow from the windows of dark buildings, roads neatly picked out by street lamps and airports every bit as difficult to pick out from the surrounding area as in real life. A scenery editor is included, which allows you to add what you like where you like. Seattle is the only big city modelled but does look very good from 2000 feet.

The manual provided is pretty good, and although I have not needed to call upon Looking Glass for help I understand they are quite good. I look forward to more scenery and a helicopter from them later on.

I enjoy using Flight Unlimited, because it suits my kind of simulator flying, that is, local and low with good scenery, weather and ATC. If you want to ‘fly the World’, then Flight simulator 2000 is a better bet, but I give full marks to Looking Glass for producing a very good flight simulation. I hope you have enjoyed reading this limited review of one of today’s excellent flight simulators. Please feel free to contact me if you have any comments or questions to put to me.