The future of home cockpits and flight simulation

While crawling around public forums I see a lot of postings of bitterly disappointed people when it comes to Microsoft Flight, so that has gotten me thinking (wow!).

As most of us know Flight Simulation on the desktop started long ago with FS 1 by Bruce Artwick [see “History of Microsoft Flight Simulator”]. I have been interested in aviation since I was a kid and many years ago when my father installed Flight Simulator 98 on his computer I was thrilled. I soon became disappointed at the graphics to some extent, buy hey back then the masses didn’t have access to anything better. What I was really disappointed at was that the PCs were not fast enough to properly “play” flight simulator, especially with the keyboard. One spent more time pushing keyboard buttons to correct the over-shootings than actually flying. I stopped playing FS98.

That is until one day in 2006 or so, I bough Flight Simulator 2004 (FS9) and I discovered a whole new world where one could actually kind of fly a plane in a more realistic manner. The technology of PCs and graphic cards was mature enough and soon enough I found myself buying extra hardware such as rudder pedals and flight simulation yokes (CH Products), a throttle quadrant (Saitek) and a B737 autopilot module (Go Flight, Inc.). I also started flying online for more realistic ATC and joined a serious community where actually learning about aviation and navigation was more important than the game aspect.

Nowadays I would say there are two major groups of Flight Simulator users. The first group being gamers, people that aren’t really interested in aviation, they just want to hop on the virtual aircraft and take off without even knowing much about aerodynamics or what the instruments tell you. The other group is hard-core flight simmers, people that use Flight Simulator as a learning tool to learn about aviation. I belong to that last group.

Invariably, hard core flight simmers have spent considerable amounts of hard-earned money in buying software add-ons (more realistic aircrafts, weather engines, scenery) as well as high-tech hardware to build (some to a greater extent) their own home cockpits.

My Share of the Pie

I don’t have any other than enjoying learning more and more about aviation using FSX without suffering any physical or financial damage

A terrible day for Serious Flight Simmers

And then back in 2009 most of us heard the shocking news! for some strange reason Microsoft had decided to crash and burn the Aces Studio, the team that had been in charge of post-Bruce Artwick versions of Flight Simulator for so many years.

Yes, the world came to and end for most serious flight simulator enthusiasts, Microsoft was stopping the FS franchise with Flight Simulator X.  Sure, there is X-Plane and Flight Gear but FSX is FSX, period (even with its shortcomings!).

There were talks by some companies such as Aerosoft about developing a new flight simulator but a couple of years after, little about that is known so I presume that went nowhere.

Gathering my thoughts

So, where am I going to? Last year Microsoft announced Microsoft Flight which promises a lot. However, by reading posts in public forums and seeing the web episodes on the official site, I have come to believe what everyone fears: Flight might become a game rather than a simulation but we may still have to wait for the final outcome.

Anyway, the actual purpose of this post is to put this nagging question out there.

What is the consequence of the demise of Flight Simulator for all the home cockpit builders out there in the world? Many of whom have spent thousands of dollars buying specialized hardware to emulate the cockpit to nearly absolute perfection.

For now everybody is safe I think, but we all know that every time Microsoft brings out a new Operating System version, old ones are phased out and no longer supported, many “legacy” applications (MS FS falls in that category) simply stop working on the newer OS versions. The day will come that a new OS is brought and Flight Simulator X will simply stop working for good. What a huge disappointment that would be for those that spent a lot of money emulating cockpits like real life!

There appears to be one viable alternative, it is Lockheed Martin’s Prepare3D. It is based on the Microsoft ESP (not extra sensorial perception) which is the base of Microsoft FSX. Lockheed Martin’s bought its rights (as far as I know) back in 2009. But with a price tag of $499 I think many would think not twice but 15 times!