var fDesc=new Array(); fDesc[0] = "The FlightGear Flight Simulator project (often shortened to FlightGear or FGFS) is an open-source, multi-platform, cooperative flight simulator development project. It also simulates space flight in Earth's orbit.

FlightGear's flight dynamics engine (JSBSim) is used in a 2015 NASA benchmark to judge new simulation code to the standards of the space industry. It's used professionally for research and development, as well as non-professionally.


The simulator is created by an international group of volunteers, and released as free, open-source GPL software.

The goal of the FlightGear project is to create a sophisticated and open flight simulator framework for use in research or academic environments, pilot training, as an industry engineering tool, for DIY-ers to pursue their favorite interesting flight simulation idea, and last but certainly not least as a fun, realistic, and challenging desktop flight simulator.

We are developing a sophisticated, open simulation framework that can be expanded and improved upon by anyone interested in contributing. There are many exciting possibilities for an open, free flight sim. We hope that this project will be interesting and useful to many people in many areas.

As of 2020 there are over 700 aircraft and spacecraft projects available with 1 click download and install from the sim's launcher - in the launcher, these projects are filterable by stage of advancement in different areas. More craft are available at 3rd party hangars, and github repositories for different craft projects.

FlightGear 2020.3.8 and later has 3d models of buildings, roads, cities etc. , based on Open StreetMap (OSM) data and automatic generation, for the whole world.

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Raspberry Pi, others. Appimages are available for Linux.


Most users should download the Long Term Stable (LTS) release for their platform. Current LTS is version 2020.3. There are regular bugfix and stable feature releases for each LTS e.g. 2020.3.13 for 13th release.

FlightGear runs on a huge range of hardware, and supports renderers from older eras. To make sure FlightGear starts up on older hardware, graphics options are mostly turned off by default. Use menus inside the simulator to turn graphics and environment features on."; function tShowHide(id, show) { var s = document.getElementById("desc"); if ((s.innerHTML.length<=212 || show==1) && show!=2) { s.innerHTML = fDesc[id]; if (document.getElementById('m1')) document.getElementById('m1').style.display='none'; if (document.getElementById('m2')) document.getElementById('m2').style.display='none'; if (document.getElementById('more_txt')) document.getElementById('more_txt').style.display='inline'; } else { s.innerHTML = ''; } }