It was one of the earliest Sun games distributed with a free playable demo that you could unlock by buying a license key. It would let you play for a minute or so and then the simulation would stop abruptly. That inspired me to do the same thing with SimCity for the Sun: you could play for a few minutes, then the simulator would switch to a cellular automata that would scramble your city, until you bought a license key to unlock it.
The GX was an 8-bit display, so it uses a 256 color palette, and drew shaded colors by halftone stippling. You can clearly see that in this video:
Aviator 1.5.1 running on SunOS 4.1.4 on a Sparcstation 20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQscDJCy4c
Aviator had "aircraftcap" file in the format of (yech) a termcap file, that allowed you to configure your aircraft, and several fighter aircraft, small planes, and a 747 were included.
I heard a story about a fighter pilot who played Aviator, but he noticed something was wonky about how a plane he was familiar with flew. So he too a look at the aircraftcap file, and was able to find the problem, tweak it, and then it flew much more to his satisfaction!
You could dogfight over the network, and the sneaky thing to do was to hack your aircraftcap file to mount your guided missiles far behind you fighter jet, so when somebody was on your tail, you could shoot them in the ass!
Software in silicon: the methodology behind Sun's GX graphics accelerator architecture:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/63673
Sun GX Series Graphics Workstations:
https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc01...
AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES MARKET (July 8 1991):
https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/aviator_15_for_sun_netwo...
SGI Users Group Forum: "Aviator" - a flight sim program for Sun GX - does anyone have this installed? Can anyone run it and get screenshots or video?
https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/aviator-a-flight-sim...
Vintage Computer Federation Forums: The "Aviator" flight sim for Sun GX hardware (e.g. SPARCstations)
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/the-aviator-flight...
Reddit: A request to owners of Sun GX hardware such as SPARCstations: Can anyone post screenshots or footage from the late 80s/early 90s flight sim "Aviator"?
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/y9zfhs/a_...