FlightGear

Mountain-flying in the French Alps (jue, 26 abr 2012)
Author: Thorsten Renk Altiports If you are up for some challenging approaches and tricky landings while you like to enjoy spectacular scenery, here is a good suggestion for a destination – try visiting the French altiports. Altiports are small airfields for small aircraft and helicopters located high up in the mountains, often serving a ski resort. The runway is usually short and quite steeply sloped (in the case of Courchevel, the slope is a solid 18.5%), and all landings are done uphill with no go-around procedure. Since the alitports are by no means in the mountain summit region, the approaches … Read the rest... >>
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Developing Computer Vision Algorithms with FlightGear (lun, 26 mar 2012)
Ocean Debris On March 12, 2012 suspected Japanese tsunami debris was discovered washed up on the beaches of Long Beach, CA.  On March 11 a deserted fishing vessel was spotted off the coast of British Columbia; by March 24 it had drifted within 120 miles of the coastline.  For many years NOAA.gov has been monitoring an every growing area in the North Pacific dubbed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” that appears to be collecting and concentrating all manner of plastic debris from all over the world.  Whether you are a dedicated environmentalist, or a person that leans more towards managing … Read the rest... >>
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Interview: Christian Schmitt (vie, 02 mar 2012)
Q: What is your forum/IRC nickname? Surprise: it’s papillon81. Yes, I’m that guy :) Q: How long have you been involved in FlightGear? Acording to my mail correspondence it must have been in 2007/2008 when I became an active part. I was unsatisfied with the state of EDDF in the FG scenery (no buildings, lightpoles everywhere), so I teamed up with a guy who had already started some work there. I ended up creating all of the terminal buildings and improving the airport layout. In those days, not many pilots were flying there. This changed in the months afterwards, which was … Read the rest... >>
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Web Site Updates (mar, 28 feb 2012)
May 12, 2012: Scenery Download Page updated The World Scenery Download page is updated to SVN version 19892 (current as of May 12, 2012.)  It may take a day or so for the updated files to flush through the mirror system. February 28, 2012: Version 2.6.0 Updates Both Mac OS X and Windows have had small tweaks to follow up the v2.6 release.  For Mac OS X there is “r319″ version of the 2.6.0 dmg which fixes a couple problems some Mac users were seeing.  For Windows there is a “Setup FlightGear 2.6.0.1.exe” which fixes one small 32bit vs. 64bit … Read the rest... >>
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Advanced Weather v1.4 in Flightgear 2.6+ (vie, 24 feb 2012)
Part I: Convective clouds Author: Thorsten Renk The screenshots shown in the following use shaders, textures and scenery which are for various reasons (incompatible license, too recent development,…) not part of the official Flightgear 2.6 release. However, these are available for download and every feature works with Flightgear 2.6. The following packages need to be installed in addition to get to see the same: lightfield shader package v1.1, Juneau custom scenery, and textures from regional textures v0.1. An integrated weather system Without a doubt, clouds, haze and fog are the most easily noticed features of weather in … Read the rest... >>
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FlightGear v2.6.0 Released (lun, 20 feb 2012)
Also available in: Nederlands, Español, Français, Português, Română   The FlightGear development team is happy to announce the v2.6.0 release of FlightGear, the free, open-source flight simulator. This new version contains many exciting new features, enhancements and bugfixes. Major improvements from v2.4.0 include reduced AI aircraft load times, easier graphics tuning, more sophisticated AI aircraft and improved usability. Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. FlightGear is used … Read the rest... >>
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Sky Diving Visualization (mar, 07 feb 2012)
The Challenge As a skydiver adds more gear such as front packs and items strapped to legs or arms, the jumper’s basic stability in free-fall is reduced.  It becomes easier to tumble out of control and there is less margin for error.  Similarly, the aerodynamic wake of the jumper may interfere with pilot chute opening (known as “hesitation”). Investigating different gear configurations generally involves vertical wind tunnel testing, or actual tests with jumpers. To avoid some of the cost, and mitigating safety concerns, a tool to computationally analyze these jumpers and their gear is highly desired. Creare, Inc., an R+D … Read the rest... >>
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Interview: Durk Talsma (mié, 01 feb 2012)
Q: What is your forum nickname? Hehe, guess once. Q: How long have you been involved in FlightGear? Almost since the beginning, actually. I first heard about the project in 1997, when I got an email from Curt Olson, in response to a posting on the usenet newsgroup rec.aviation.simulators. Q: What are your major interests in FlightGear? I like the open nature of the project and the possibility to contribute at various levels. Q: What projects are you working on right now? I am actually doing several different things for FlightGear. My main project is developing a fully integrated AI … Read the rest... >>
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FlightGear v2.6 Release Candidates (dom, 29 ene 2012)
This is the place to find the v2.6.0 release candidates as they become available.  We would really love for everyone to download these “test” releases and give them a try.  The target date for the official FlightGear v2.6.0 release is February 17. Download FlightGear v2.6 Release Candidates: Windows (updated Feb 15, 2012): Download FlightGear v2.6 RC3 here: [Mirror 1] [Mirror 2] [Mirror 3] MacOSX RC2 (updated February 7, 2012):  You can download it from http://macflightgear.sf.net openSUSE: Follow this link to install “fgrun” which will also automatically install FlightGear as a dependency. What’s New? We have started a page on the … Read the rest... >>
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What would it be like to fly a rocket into space? (jue, 26 ene 2012)
Do you want to earn your astronaut’s wings? Author: Thorsten Renk Real spaceships aren’t actually piloted into orbit. The risk that a human being, strapped to his acceleration seat and under a crushing acceleration of 4 g for a prolonged period of time is unable to fly with the precision required to reach orbit is far too great, and real spacecraft reach orbit on autopilot. But what would it be like? Welcome to a scenario in which a Russian Vostok spacecraft has been acquired by the USA and fitted for a manually flown mission. This is the launch vehicle assembled … Read the rest... >>
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