X-Plane and FlightGear - Advanced Flight Simulators For Linux PCs

If you always wanted to fly but were held back by the expense and risks of flying real airplanes, you may want to give X-Plane a try. It is one of the most advanced flight simulator software packages for personal computers and includes complete scenery of the planets Earth and Mars. X-Plane creates a realistic flight model by computing the forces to act upon each part of the aircraft. A wide range of aircraft are available, and you can build your own.

A free and open source alternative to X-Plane is FlightGear, which has been under development for ten years and has come a long way. It is a highly realistic flight simulator for use on ordinary PCs. It has been developed on Linux but is also available for most other common platforms. The wide range of aircrafts and terrain, and the realistic simulations of the aircraft behavior and the environment, including the sun, moon and earth make it both fun and instructional.

FlightGear's simulation engine and 3D graphics rendering are so advanced that the system is used for all kinds of projects, such as a system for analyzing oscillation problems in jets, or as a visualization tool for unmanned aerial vehicles. A FlightGear based simulation was used as part the TV show Justice to provide illustrations in a plane crash investigation.