Google Earth Flight Simulator

[Justice For All]

Did you know that Google Earth has it's own flight simulator?! It's not state of the art, but it's not bad either.

Download Google Earth here;

You must be registered to see links

Install and run Google Earth, in the toolbar hover over Tools > Enter Flight Simulator.

The controls take a very short while to get used to, but once you do it's loads of fun. You can either control your aircraft with the arrow keys, or your mouse. You can also adjust your rudders using the 4 and 6 keys, 4 is left, 6 right, 5 levels them, 2 is down and 8 is up. Page up increases speed, page down decreases, F sets your flap settings, G deploys landing gear and those are pretty much the basics you need to know.

The HUD is pretty self explanatory and doesn't take much to understand. The middle part is your AOD or angle of direction, -degree = your nose is pitched down, +degree = your nose is pitched up. The top left measures your air speed (you can adjust it to MPH, Knots, KMH etc.) and the right tells you your altitude.

As for aircraft, you can choose between a standard fighter jet, or a stunt plane. (I prefer the fighter jet of-course) The fighter jet if I remember correctly has a top speed of just under Mach 1, or around 700 MPH at altitude, but I modified mine to go about Mach 4-5 as you can see in the video lol You can do this easily if you want to by editing the thrust power in the settings but do it at your own risk because at those high speeds it's very easy to lose control and crash, as you can see in the video at 3,500+ MPH you barely move the mouse and it spins extremely fast.

If you mess around with the settings abit you can find things like terrain exaggeration where you can make everything completely flat or really mountainous, you can also travel around Mars and the Moon which are even more fun to mess around in. Max altitude is around 10 miles high, but with a modified aircraft you can pretty much go endless. (Max I've gotten was around 350 miles high)

Here are a couple videos of me messing around in it so you can get a quick idea of what it looks like;





Also, a bonus (real) video :

 

[Supicioso]

I tried this, but couldn't get the damn thing to go over 1000 knots....

Couldn't find the "Settings" either.

 

[eXtremousZ]

Looks cool.

 

[Justice For All]

I tried this, but couldn't get the damn thing to go over 1000 knots....

Couldn't find the "Settings" either.

My bad I should've been a bit more specific, go to Program Files > Google > Google Earth > Client > res > flightsim > aircraft. Then right click f16.acf and click open with notepad/notepad ++.

First search for cruise speed, double it from it's current number. This sets how fast you cruise at, pretty self explanatory.

Now search for 'Power Plant' (without the marks of-course) once you find the power plant section, you'll see P_max and F_max. P=power level F=force, tinker around with how fast you want your aircraft to be able to go (anything over 10k knots will be near impossible to control, I could control about 9k knots just barely and only sometimes so there is a cap of-course) I believe if you want to be able to go just around Mach 1 the setting has to be somewhere around 600-800 for both. Don't mess with the e at the end, that's the exponent in which the base number gets multiplied by. So, basically mess with that and you're making a HUGE change.

Just tinker around with the settings until you get a comfortable speed. My settings are;

Cruise Speed : 1000
P_max : 2000e7
F_max : 2000e3

This allows me to go right around 4,500 MPH or about Mach 5.5. That's my comfortable speed in which I can still perform maneuvers.

Also I just remembered another really cool thing about this. If you turn the terrain exaggeration up to the max, then go out to the oceans, you can fly underwater and in parts like near the challenger deep you get an extra 50,000 feet or so added onto your flight space.

That also reminds me, I forgot to include how to reduce your flap setting. To increase press f of-course as I already stated in the first post, but to decrease them press shift+f. More flaps = more wind resistance so you'll turn sharper and catch drafts easier.

 

[Grenadier]

Aahaha, i remember this.. Looks like they made a few improvements.

 

[Lewis]

I mess around with this when I'm bored, still haven't mastered the controls ):

 

[Justice For All]

I mess around with this when I'm bored, still haven't mastered the controls ):

The controls are easy to master (for me) however it's the sensitivity that I can't get the hang of. But I believe that's only because I'm usually going a couple thousand MPH more than what they allow you to because I edited my files, however at normal speeds of what they intended it's really smooth and easy to control.