Flight Dynamics Model

Flight Dynamics Models are how the flight for an aircraft is simulated in the program. FlightGear uses a variety of internally written and imported flight model projects. Any aircraft must be programmed to use one of these models. Currently FlightGear is the only graphical flight simulator all the FDM are used for, and UIUC and YASim were developed specifically for FlightGear.

The early version used a FDM based on LaRCsim by NASA, which was replaced with more flexible FDMs.

• JSBSim - the default flight dynamics model software since 2000.
• YASim - another FDM using different calculation methods. Introduced starting in 0.7.9 in 2002.
• UIUC - another included FDM, developed by the UIUC Applied Aerodynamics Group at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, also made use of LaRCsim.
• FlightGear can also be set up to render using inputs from an external FDM source, such as from Matlab.
• Other custom FDM for a specific aircraft type have been written, such as for lighter than air aircraft.

For developers, see also FDM engine feature standardization