Realism

How realistic is FlightGear aircraft and environment? How can I get the most realism out of the FlightGear environment?

Aircraft

Todo: instruments

Flight

Todo: qualities of flight models

Environment

Extensive and Accurate World Scenery Data Base

   *   Over 20,000 real world airports included in the full scenery set.
   * Correct runway markings and placement, correct runway and approach lighting.
   * Taxiways available for many larger airports (even including the green center line lights when appropriate.)
   * Sloping runways (runways change elevation like they usually do in real life.)
   * Directional airport lighting that smoothly changes intensity as your relative view direction changes.
   * World scenery fits on 3 DVD's. (I'm not sure that's a feature or a problem!) But it means we have pretty detailed coverage of the entire world.
   * Accurate terrain worldwide, based on the most recently released SRTM terrain data.) 3 arc second resolution (about 90m post spacing) for North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.
   * Scenery includes all vmap0 lakes, rivers, roads, railroads, cities, towns, land cover, etc.
   * Nice scenery night lighting with ground lighting concentrated in urban areas (based on real maps) and headlights visible on major highways. This allows for realistic night VFR flying with the ability to spot towns and cities and follow roads.
   * Scenery tiles are paged (loaded/unloaded) in a separate thread to minimize the frame rate hit when you need to load new areas. 

Weather

Todo: weather

• Precipitation is modeled, but the graphics require improvement. Suffcient only to indicate rain.

• Lightning is present when a thunderstorm is near, the graphics are a fair representation, but also require improvement.

Accurate and Detailed Sky Model

FlightGear implements extremely accurate time of day modeling with correctly placed sun, moon, stars, and planets for the specified time and date. FlightGear can track the current computer clock time in order to correctly place the sun, moon, stars, etc. in their current and proper place relative to the earth. If it's dawn in Sydney right now, it's dawn in the sim right now when you locate yourself in virtual Sydney. The sun, moon, stars, and planets all follow their correct courses through the sky. This modeling also correctly takes into account seasonal effects so you have 24 hour days north of the arctic circle in the summer, etc. We also illuminate the correctly placed moon with the correctly placed sun to get the correct phase of the moon for the current time/date, just like in real life.