by Bob "Groucho" Marks

Happy Fingers

To me, the most appealing thing about Fly is the detailed modeling of the systems. If you hate button pushing, keep a wide berth. Everything you would have to fiddle with in a real aircraft- weather radar, radio stacks, even de-icing equipment and pressurization- are on beautifully rendered panels just waiting to be played with.

Unlike Sierra's Pro Pilot 99, which crams everything front-and-center on a low-res panel, everything is right were they should be. Switches and controllers are on different console around the cockpit of the airplane, just as they are placed in the real thing. This makes for some high workload stuff…descending through nasty weather to a landing is every bit as hairy and busy as lining up on a hot target for a Mav pass in Falcon.

The modeling is very deep on the Allied-Signal King avionics, especially on the KLN-89 GPS set. In fact, it would be pretty cool if you could play with the avionics while AI flies the airplane just for those of us who use the things for real to practice a bit. That's not to say that Fly is a good procedures trainer, either for IFR or VFR. A decent familiarization trainer for the types represented in the sim, maybe, but the flight modeling and radio environment isn't really all that good.

Working the radios is very easy. Pulling up a vector map and clicking on the VOR or airport of you choice brings up a frequency list. You can either click on the freq you want or tune the radios by cursor hand…a trick I found to be a bit difficult and balky. Maybe it is the resolution I run at (1024x768) but I found those things to hard to "grab". So I stuck with clicking the freq.

ATC works well, if a little too canned sounding. At least the different posts (ATIS, Departure, Ground, etc) have different voices. Proper procedure is encouraged by the controllers (they prompt if you heard or not when you don't acknowledge them), but you won't mistake it for flight through a real airspace.

Time to Fly!

That elusive feeling of flight in Fly is better than any other civsim I've flown…maybe it's the excellent sound effects, or maybe it's the clouds. Probably the clouds. The atmospheric effects are just plain mind blowing. With varying densities, colors, and opacities, the clouds are a blast to fly around, over, or through. Best in the simulator world, bar none. Fly through clouds with a cold outside air temp, however, and you can ice up- a nice touch, and fun to deal with by engaging the deicing gear.

Click to continue

There is no way of seeing the ice on the wings from inside the cabin, however. There are signs- performance bleeds off inexplicably, and you must get an outside view to confirm the white stuff on you leading edge. That is a Class-A drag to have to use an outside view to confirm a situation- immersion takes a hit. But ignore ice at your peril- you will end up spinning out of the cloud deck, plowing your two million dollar kerosene-burning toy into a strip mall or nursery school, no doubt.

Not that you can tell what you hit, or anything.

Fly!'s Flaws

That rather clunky segue brings us to the section in which the sniveling takes place. Fly is not perfect. If you are like me, you cringe when you see a software box that proclaims that they use satellite imagery. So far, that has never panned out to be as cool as it sounds. Ground graphics in Fly are no exception. The ground terrain, while passable in some of the usual metropolitan areas, is rather bland everywhere else.

Eye candy, you sneer. Hey, I'm as hard over about the perception of realism, aka hardcore, as the next guy, but if I'm going to give up a gig and a half of hard drive then I want something pretty to look at. Airports, while very numerous, are not always where they should be in the real world. Indeed some are not even where they are shown on the supplied sectional maps. Reef Runway at Honolulu, for example, is at least a mile and a half inland. Big minus.

The biggest disappointment, however, is the complete omission of damage modeling coupled with the spotty flight model. Damage modeling, in a civsim? Damn right. A lot of hard-over civsim drivers deride this concept…calling us combat simmers "Flying Quake Players" and such. True, there is a part of me that thinks that a 747 in a sim doesn't look quite right unless engine #3 is smoking, but there is a definite, and in my opinion, essential place for it.

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