Have your flight simuator fix on Mac, Linux - free

Ever dream of being a pilot, flying through the skies as free as a bird, but can't achieve those dreams because of some physical test that you can't pass for a pilot's license (or the fact that you get airsick and throw up a lot).

And you used to have Microsoft Flight Simulator, which you - naively - think is the only flight sim ever made and have since looked for something like it since you've switched to Mac?
Flight Gear
Well, aside from booting natively into Boot Camp to run it, now you can fly again with Flight Gear. Flight Gear comes with an extensive and Accurate World Scenery Data Base:

* Over 20,000 real world airports included in the full scenery set.
* Correct runway markings and placement, correct runway and approach lighting.
* Taxiways available for many larger airports (even including the green center line lights when appropriate.)
* Sloping runways (runways change elevation like they usually do in real life.)
* Directional airport lighting that smoothly changes intensity as your relative view direction changes.
* World scenery fits on 3 DVD's. (I'm not sure that's a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world.
* Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
* Scenery includes all vmap0 lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, etc.
* Nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and headlights visible on major highways. This allows for realistic night VFR flying with the ability to spot towns and cities and follow roads.
* Scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread to minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas.

Accurate and Detailed Sky Model
FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. FlightGear can track the current computer clock time in order to correctly place the sun, moon, stars, etc. in their current and proper place relative to the earth. If it's dawn in Sydney right now, it's dawn in the sim right now when you locate yourself in virtual Sydney. The sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky. This modeling also correctly takes into account seasonal effects so you have 24 hour days north of the arctic circle in the summer, etc. We also illuminate the correctly placed moon with the correctly placed sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.

To quote from its web site:

"The FlightGear flight simulator project is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. Source code for the entire project is available and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, for the development and pursuit of other interesting flight simulation ideas, and as an end-user application. We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing.

There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.

FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear 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 Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps. "

Visit and download now!
http://www.flightgear.org/

See Flight Gear Gallery here
http://www.flightgear.org/Gallery-v1.9/