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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

X-Plane has a professional version that's used in FAA-certified flight simulators. The home version on a laptop runs the same simulation code.

Most flight sim games, including Microsoft's, start with performance data on the airplane. X-Plane starts with the shape of the airplane and physically models the airflow. It's even used by aircraft designers.

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The modeling in X-Plane works great on fake experimental aircraft but lookup tables have their place too, especially for real aircraft where every single small performance characteristic is known to several decimal places.

Within the normal flight envelope this holds. But getting into a spin in a glider in ms fs shoes you the limits of lookup tables / their implementation as the behaviours is completely wrong. ( At least ask the way up to fsx)

In another universe these software were banned after 9/11

In this universe these games are closed source and there's no guarantee that, if someone for example uses them for training to crash airliners, a red flag isn't raised somewhere.

Given that this is Microsoft i would be very surprised by this. They are too incompetent to be able go think about such a huge details. And even if they were forced to implement this feature it would be poorly done and would probably have a lot of false positives which would make the data almost useless. (I dont know about games from other companies)

I think just about every kid who has played a flight sim has intentionally crashed into a building at least once.

I reserve the right to crash virtual planes into virtual buildings, I dont know what else youd use a flight simulator for.

the number of red flags thrown would be excessive. Who hasn't purposely crashed their plane in a flight simulator just to see what happens.

Or to see how difficult it is, which is not difficult at all. Hitting the ground of course is trivial, but you can probably hit a skyscraper the first time you boot up a flight sim. It's hard to imagine anyone doing much "training" specifically for that.

One example: the release of Propeller Arena for Sega Dreamcast was scheduled for September 19, 2001. The release was canceled just days after the attack.

I was going to say, I've heard that x-plane is supposed to be the better sim between the two. But I don't have the background to make a comparison.

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