Flightgear and Joysticks

I've always liked Flight simulators, the great thing about them being that you can fly an great variety of aircraft you would never be allowed to fly in real life and you can, virtually, explore the world.

To my knowledge, until about a year or two ago, all flight simulators were exclusively for Windows. That is until I found two other options: the first was X-Plane, which, like Microsoft Flight Simulator you have to pay for. I downloaded the demo but it was just too slow and required an advanced graphics card which my Macbook doesn't have. However, after a bit more searching on the web, I found in my opinion the best flight sim out there: Flightgear. What is so special about Flightgear is that it's totally open source which means only one thing: it's also totally free. In addition, you can download additional planes for no extra cost and although there are some bugs, it remains great.

Since I discovered it, I've been using on and off, but recently I realised that if I was going to start doing it properly, I was going to need a good joystick. After all, fumbling around with numerous key combinations and trying desperately to remember them all was not my idea of fun. So, from experience I greatly suggest buying a joystick if you want to get serious with flight sims. It's the only way round.

After researching possible options, I settled for the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro (pictured). It was the only one that clearly was Mac compatible (all joysticks are in a sense but on some, not all buttons work. On the Extreme 3D Pro everything was fully functional), and it also looked sturdy compared to some of it's counterparts.

I got it through the Logitech website and it arrived in a nice box with UPS. My first impressions are that it is very good. Flightgear automatically detects what type of joystick it is and gives you the controls but the problem is that they are not valid. I had to figure out myself what controlled what, but it was OK.

I soon got familiar with the controls and even managed to land Concorde (video) which I was proud of (Concorde is a pretty hard plane to fly in Flightgear). You can also check out the vid for gameplay.

I highly recommend Flightgear and the Extreme 3D Pro. You can find both at the links below:

Flightgear-http://www.flightgear.org/

Joystick-http://www.logitech.com/en-us/gaming/joysticks/devices/291