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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Crashing into stuff is great fun and probably the first impulse of anyone booting up a flight simulation program (especially kids) -- so much so that flight simulation software was the target of a moral panic in 2001 after the September 11 attacks were conducted by crashing real jets into buildings. Some people began to think of flight sims as "terrorist training tools" and call for them to be banned. That's probably why the screen simply went blank.

Previous versions would display a "cracked windshield" over the cockpit view and the word "CRASH". Flight Simulator 5.0 would switch to an external view and show your aircraft shattering into pieces. MFS2020 can simulate an aircraft that was partially damaged after colliding with an obstacle, but a catastrophic crash will just fade to black and pop up a message. Lame.

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I built a game in the Flash days called Stunt Pilot, which happened to sit at #1 on HN the day of its release way back in 2007. Though that's way less of an achievement than it would be today!

You played a stunt plane that would fly through hoops and around obstacles. The game featured a lite physics destruction model where if you made a mistake it would blow to pieces and tear down whatever you ran in to. Not as part of the gameplay, but in order to make your inevitable mistakes more entertaining. It featured user editable replays and a level editor, so people could post and rate content. I guess you know where this is going...

Probably 50% of the levels and replays turned out to be something along the lines of "9/11 simulator". I culled it manually as best I could and eventually turned it off. I found it pretty funny how much of a cesspit user generated content turned out to be (in the same way that you'd laugh at 4chan), though I do wish I spent the many weeks rolling it out on something else.

https://jayisgames.com/images/stuntpilot.jpg

Not #1 but definitely at the top of HN on that day :) https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2007-11-28

There are multiple posts in the #1 spot on any given day.

> flight simulation software was the target of a moral panic in 2001 after the September 11 attacks were conducted by crashing real jets into buildings. Some people began to think of flight sims as "terrorist training tools" and call for them to be banned.

I've been wondering if this is why there was so little flight simulation software out there in the last ~15 years or so. I remember visiting a retail store with software in the 2010's and wondering why there is a simulator for everything except an airplane.

There have been 2 outstanding flight simulators on the market for the past ~20 years which more-or-less dominate the industry. X-Plane and MSFS are both excellent and both reasonably affordable. I suspect the lack of flight sims in retail has more to do with the fact that flight simulators are hard to create. When there is established competition with a great rep and decent pricing, it's nearly impossible to break into a market profitably.

If you want air combat, DCS is the top choice. Because they model very complex state-of-the-art jet fighters, it is also very complex.

All flight sims are very complex, it's sort of the nature of the beast. I think that's the fundamental difference between a simulator and a game. A simulator needs to model reality, a game can take big shortcuts to ease gameplay.

Indeed. The dearth in flight sims predated 9/11, and was likely because MFS and X-Plane filled everyone's needs adequately, with FlightGear available as an open source option.

>> MFS2020 can simulate an aircraft that was partially damaged after colliding with an obstacle

Scenarios where aircraft strike fixed objects and remain airborne are virtually unheard of. Bird strikes are one thing, but touching a cessna wing to any building is a realworld game over. Touch any pole, any power line, any bridge, anything larger than a goose and you aren't going home.

F-15s: "Hold my beer."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision

Great photo of the aftermath here: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9884/did-an-f-1...

Ya, but that wasn't a fixed object but another aircraft. Aircraft, even fighters, are soft and light compared to buildings and rocks.

> Scenarios where aircraft strike fixed objects and remain airborne are virtually unheard of

A cable car cables are not properly fixed, still quite an impact:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalese_cable_car_disaster_%2...

I think the primary use case is to enable simulation of emergency crash landings and landings with the gear up.

It's also not that easy to do- you at least need a few hours playing a proper sim before you can reliably hit a building. Before 2006 (IIRC) there were was not much else to do but just fly around before they started doing tutorials and challenges and such. As a kid I would just do loops around airports until I learned to land semi reliably, fly into buildings, fly under bridges, try to fly and find recognizable things.

Flying under the BK bridge, and into the sears and twin towers was probably the biggest "activity" I did on flight sims.

> MFS2020 can simulate an aircraft that was partially damaged after colliding with an obstacle, but a catastrophic crash will just fade to black... Lame.

It’s a simulator, not a video game. What would be more realistic than this?

NTSB investigation and paperwork

That's because a few of the terrorists actually used flight sim games to "train" prior to the hijackings.

It wasn't completely unfounded hysteria.

True, but at the time, anyone who wanted to fly a plane (for recreation, commercially, etc.) would be likely to use a flight sim as an inexpensive starting point for training or practice, and that's not even counting the people who might never step into a cockpit, but enjoy flight sims regardless. Terrorism was a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the use cases for flight simulators.

And when this happened, the dust had just settled on a big nontroversy over the role of first-person shooters in real-life shootings -- arguably, a stronger case can be built for restrictions on those (for example, not allowing them to be sold to small children) than for restrictions on civilian flight sims.

Flight sims are a lot more useful than FPSes for training.

My first flight hour was an ILS approach in a King Air. Supervised, for sure, but the owner was rather shocked I could navigate and follow glide slope without any actual time in the air.

The same is not true for a FPS.

Here's one of the news stories about it, mentioning a British government report into the intelligence they had around September 11 and usage of MS Flight Simulator. (Apologies for a Daily Mail link, it's the only one I could find with some quick Googling, but it was commonly reported at the time.)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-357006/The-flight-s...

Almost all pilots use flight simulator "Games" during training.

And when the US military drops a bomb on a wedding party in Afghanistan, it is a certainty that those pilots/operators trained on a simulation at some point.

The Flight Unlimited series in the '90s had a great crash system where you could watch your plane get ripped apart and the pieces bounce along the terrain until you restarted. It wasn't entirely realistic, but it was pretty impressive for a game from 1997.

I was really disappointed when I tried other flight sims and found out they just stopped instead of doing the same thing.

You can see the Flight Unlimited version of plane crashes at 3 minutes in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk8MBD9sUi4

Market opportunity for an indie developer to create a flight simulator with real collision physics?

I'm not sure how complex flight simulators are to develop, I assume that getting real world data for plane characteristics modelling and such are part of the problem but as a project for software engineering I don't know if an indie developer could realistically create such a game.

The best damage model in a flight simulator so far is [IL-2 Sturmovik](https://hypertexthero.com/il2-flight-joy/).

The next game by the developer of Kerbal Space Program Felipe Falanghe is called Balsa Model Flight Simulator and it is already a lot of fun (I am currently playing a closed beta and it should be out soon):

First ground takeoff in a plane I built: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/715155254

Midair collision during dogfight: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/715177161

Action figures in the cockpit: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/715210985

I am enjoying [MSFS 2020](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/715725728) but the lack of a damage model and the “Empty Screen of Death” is really disappointing. I hope they add a damage model eventually. Seeing things go wrong without dying or hurting anyone is one of the joys of video games.

Also keep an eye out for [Dead Stick](https://store.steampowered.com/app/771800/Deadstick__Bush_Fl...).

In the mean time there's always Kerbal Space Program.

Try A-10 Cuba if you want to see this done right, in terms of fun.

Can knock bits of your wings off, grind your gears up etc

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