Why is Soaring declining

Bruce Hoult wrote:
In article ,
Tony Verhulst wrote:


I've bought several versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator in the hope
that a better version will spark my interest. So far, they bore me to tears.


Yeah, well that's possibly because it's crap! MS Flight Sim is now a
great *scenery* simulator, and ever since the days of 8 MHz Macs (maybe
even earlier) it's been pretty decent for practising IFR using AH and
VOR and ADF. But it's still got rubbish physics.

X-Plane is a much better simulator, and actually feels quite real (and
you can get some pretty good glider models for it, from
http://www.x-plane.org/Aircraft/). It's a good enough sim that several
real companies use it for pilot training and design evaluation for
aircraft they are designing. With the right add-on hardware, it's also
FAA approved for logging simulator time. Not bad for a $49.50 program.

In older programs, I found the Mac-only A-10 Attack! to feel *very*
realistic to fly -- of course I don't know what an A-10 feels like to
fly, but it felt like it *could* be a real aircraft (and I *have* been
at the controls of kinda similar size aircraft, such as the
Harvard/Texan). It also had excellent emulation of the interaction of
the landing gear and struts with the ground. I'm told the authors
(Graphic Simulations) actually make high end simulations for the
military as well as games.

There are probably some good PC simulators, too, but I don't know what
they would be -- the vast majority have very little to do with real
aircraft, whether because the programmers didn't know how (probably), or
because their customers (like the Sep11 pilots) didn't care about
takeoffs or landings, I don't know.

-- Bruce
SFS-PC (www.sfspc.de) is the best soaring simulator I have used, although
apparently there is a competitor with Sailors of the sky. Both are cheap, SFS
has good physics, and weather models that actually work.

Nothing replaces doing it though...