Hey. We can talk, right? I mean, we've flown missions in rag wings from France back in 1917, popped bad guys over Korea in the early fifties, and, um, back to Korea just lately. We're simulated combat vets. Virtually bloodied.

I know you are, or you wouldn't be here at this site reading this. We drive high performance death machines. We swagger. We BAD. So why, you're asking, is space being taken up- again- for a look at a civvie ass-and-trash hauling sim like Fly!?

Well, let me tell you why, Ace. Fly! (that exclamation point is going to get really annoying, so I'm gonna ignore it from here on out- agreed?) is- in its own pacifist way- as challenging, exhilarating, infuriating, addictive, and engaging as most kill 'em all sims out there. Did I mention "as buggy as most" also? Oops. Left one out.

I have blown far too many hours lately on Fly- hours that could have been better spent honing my Falcon weapons juggling techniques, working on my cockpit, or even (gasp) with the family. That's not to say that I'm hanging up my g-suit for good, or that Fly is perfect- no way Jose`- but I think it conveys the complexities of modern aviation better than most of the code out there. For those of you (and you know who you are) with abbreviated attention spans, I bring you The Short Version:

Affirmative

• Superior avionics and systems modeling
• Gorgeous interior graphics
• Impressive, almost-real-time importable weather effects
• Best clouds yet
• Decent, intuitive ATC and radio
• Great sound effects
• Lots of airports world wide

Negative

• Nonexistent damage modeling
• Generally boring, sometimes inaccurate terrain
• No way to induce possibility of failures
• More bugs than Rob Zombie's hair
• Sometimes unconvincing flight model
• Spotty flight model

What It Takes

This is one BIG sim, so those of you who are processor, memory, or hard drive challenged need to look elsewhere. Right on the box it states that it needs a 200 MHz Pentium minimum with a recommended 333 PII- and we know how conservative those marketing guys who write the box copy are. Ahem.

From what I can gather by reading the news groups, anything below a 100 MHz bus machine might as well be a Kodak Carousel slide viewer. On my PIII 550 / 196 MB / V3 3000 AGP Fly is like liquid silk. There is much sniping and outright artillery barrages between the various video card camps- Fly supports 32 bit cards- but I can only review what I can see on my own machine. Besides- who wants to get dragged into a video card pissing contest- I'd rather argue about religion. Suffice to say it runs nice.

If you are like me and hate loading CDs- and Fly has three of them- you can load the whole shebang on your drive…all 1600 MB of it. Yep, 1.6 Gig- good thing my hard drive echoes when I yell into it. Fly is a beast. But launch into the program and you soon see why.

Go Configure

The setup screens in Fly are about as intuitive as they come- with all the usual control, graphics, and sound management. The Realism window lets you set stuff like accurate engine startup procedures (there is a command that walks you through it, even if this is selected), auto mixture and prop, ground traction, icing, and other traffic. There is not, however, any way to induce random (or not-so-random) system failures. I think that this is a major oversight…dealing with something breaking is part of the fun in sims, especially in ones that nobody shoots at you.

When you are ready to Fly! (oh gawd), you can choose from a set of several "canned" scenarios or plan your own trip in the - what else- Flight Planning window. Pick from a whole shipload of airports, select waypoints, choose your steed and payload for weight and balance, and pick the weather.

The weather is very cool, with the ability to select rain, t-storms, and snow. You can even download near-real time weather by importing METAR files. A utility called Tweak! makes that task easy and painless. But oh, man, it can be buggy. Hurricane / TS Dennis METAR data played hell with Fly- some airports in the grip of Dennis would make the sim do weird things too numerous to mention here. When it did work, however, Dennis was a playground of king-hell crosswinds, rain, and lightning. Very cool.

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.

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.

An example- from 20,000 feet in the Piper Malibu, invert the airplane, yank it into a split-s and firewall the throttle. The let the airspeed stay pegged- way, way past Vne. A little message pops up and tells you this, when in reality the ailerons or other important appendages should flutter off. Now pull back on the stick (OK, yoke) as hard as you can. Does the gear slam out of the wells? Does the weather radar pod detach? Does the wing spar fold like a bad poker hand?

No, no, and no way- just a polite little note informing you that you've just over-geed the airframe, please do not repeat this. Not even an accelerated stall. What you have now is a cabin piston single with a head full of steam and awesome high-speed handling characteristics that I would put head to head against anything in European Air War.

What would make the simulated Piper's real counterpart rain its Bill of Materials on the landscape has just made for a great way to set the airplane down out of the weather in Fly. Even spinning out of the clouds a'la a certain recently demised celebrity will simply make loud banging noises and bounce around like a football upon impact with terra firma.

The flight model is suspect, also. The Cessna 172 and the Piper Navajo piston medium twin feel pretty authentic- the Navajo especially has a solid, heavy "feel." The others are a little weird. Don't get me wrong- at least they erred on the side of fun and playability, making the airplanes sprightlier than seems realistic.

Besides the aforementioned Mustang-trouncing Malibu, the Beech King Air feels more like a P-38 than a two million dollar flying minivan. There are other, more subtle discrepancies. The Malibu will dutch roll (when yaw- rudder deflection- couples into a roll) more like a MiG-15 than a straight winged bug smasher- In fact, the Beech Hawker bizjet, which should have some nasty divergent tendencies at high mach and altitude with the yaw damper off, simply will wag it's nose left to right like a happy puppy.

This may seem pretty minor, and in some ways it is. The bummer of it is that Terminal Reality is this close to the perfect civsim in so many ways. I'm sure that the either the marketing or legal departments of the airframe manufacturers whose license Terminal Reality displays as proof of authenticity (remember that LockMart endorses Novalogic's stuff) had something to with the nerf hot rods in Fly.

There is hope for improvement, however, since Terminal Reality has taken a cue on open-ended code from Microsoft. MS's geriatric civsim standard Flight Simulator 98 has been kept afloat and improved upon by third-party and user-created add-ons. It has a rabid following, and as such has a huge brand loyalty buyer base.

Following suit, Terminal Reality is set to release a type of terrain editor any day now (badly needed) and there is already a 737 add-on. There are a bevy of bug issues to be worked out- after all, Fly is a young, complex program, but nothing that a restart won't unjam, and so far, you know something's wrong before you put all the time into a flight. Maybe some user will find a fix. A lesson is in there- "If at first you don't succeed, let other people fix it."

Which is a tad harsh. Fly is an awesome civilian flight sim, a great change of pace when you tire of taking SA-7 up the wazoo. Good, clean, fun- and nobody gets hurt. Not even the airplanes.

The Author

Bob is the penultimate aerogeek, and has been since he was four or five. He soloed a Cessna 150 on his sixteenth birthday and has a hundred hours logged in his log book, but due to various reasons never finished training or received his private pilot license.

Because of his various aviation related jobs and experience as an airport bum, however, he has stick and throttle time in many varied aircraft, ranging from high performance homebuilts like the Rutan Long-Eze and Defiant, to big antique DC-3s, to Schweitzer sailplanes, to commuter aircraft like the Cessna 414, and to spam cans such as the Beech Duchess and Grumman Tiger.

Bob's first computer sim was a primitive proto-sim that ran on his Dad's Timex-Sinclair Microcomputer. Flash forward to the early nineties where, as a true MacAddict, he has played every last drop out of all the Apple Macintosh flight sims- Hellcats Over the Pacific, F/A-18 Hornet, and A-10 Attack / A-10 Cuba.

Seeing EF2000 on a PC made him see the error of his ways and he switched to The Dark Side- primarily because all the good sims ran on Wintel. I now am proudly conversant in all things combat sim (got the scars to prove it), and embroiled in an epic struggle to build a simulator cockpit and huge waste of time and resources dubbed the MachPit.