John the Pilot

WWII single engine aircraft without cockpits are to Microsoft what reality shows are to television. They're quick and cheap to make so you don't need a lot of viewers to make a profit. And if you do get a lot of viewers, you make a LOT of profit with little upfront risk. You may be hoping for the next Lost. But you're more likely to get "The Real Housewives of Hawaii".

I just had visions of standing in my living room with my arms outstretched moving my body back and forth, up and down controlling the ailerons and elevator while raising one or both (?) feet up and down to control the rudders on final approach to SFO for a landing. I think I prefer my yoke and rudder pedals...

What people do is more important than what they say. Microsoft Flight is getting ready to deliver their FOURTH single-engine WWII aircraft, yet there are NO multi-engine aircraft, NO jets, and NO helicopters Not a SINGLE mainstream General Aviation aircraft like Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft, Mooney or Hawker, not a SINGLE regional aircraft like ATR or the Dash-8, NOT a SINGLE executive or regional jet like Bombardier, Lear Jet or Gulfstream, not a SINGLE airliner like Boeing, Lockheed or Airbus. Microsoft is speaking loud and clear. I just don't like what they're saying.

X-plane 10 has accurate runways, roads and elevations around the world with "plausible" scenery. Don't expect much in the way of Landmarks or airport buildings outside of Seattle and select European cities in X-plane 10 default scenery.Fortunately X-plane has an active scenery development community, with lots of freeware developers and several commercial scenery developers like Aerosoft and my personal favorite, Tom Curtis.After playing around with Microsoft Flight, I REALLY appreciate having the whole world available with runways and NavAids for the world's airports, and open architecture that allows outside developers to create detailed scenery where needed.X-plane "landmark" scenery is not on par with FSX, but at least it's NOT 5 year old software with no hope of improvement. I personally have committed to X-plane 10 because I feel it's the Flight Sim for the next 5 years, not the last 5. But this may require a little patience in these early days.

If FSX works for you, than by all means keep using it. There are so many posts in the Flight forums from people that were hoping that Flight would be FS11 because of issues they've had with FSX, not to mention the large and active FS2004 community that could never get FSX to work for them, that users that are not getting what they hoped for from Flight should consider trying the free X-Plane 10 demo to see if it satisfies what they are looking for.And there are regular updates to X-Plane 10, so if you haven't tried it in the last month, you might want to try it again to see if you like it better now.X-Plane 10 may not be for every user, and neither is FSX, FS2004 nor Flight. But new flight simmers user should try at least two of these products to see what best satisfies their specific needs and desires. Or at lot of people actively use two or more of these.

Is Flight a Simulator?Can you adjust the yoke sensitivity/null zone to more closely match the aircraft?Can you install and operate a trim wheel to work like the aircraft?Can you setup and use toe brakes like the aircraft? Is there as much support for flying with a Saitek cockpit as flying with a mouse or X-box controller?I found the answers to all these questions to be NO. Granted, there are complex workarounds for some of these requiring manually editing some of Flight's system files.But my point is that this reveals that Microsoft does NOT view this product as a simulator. Otherwise after 3 years of development and a full beta test cycle they would support these basic simulator features.

Microsoft has shown they know what the public wants by providing the two aircraft at the product launch that everyone dreams about flying, the Maule and the Icon.The great minds behind Flight realized the general public has no interest in flying aircraft like those from Cessna, Boeing, Airbus, Piper, Mooney, Cirrus, Lear, Gulfstream or Beechcraft.I'm not sure why they made the P51 Mustang available. But at least they were smart enough to avoid including anything that would get in the way of flying this aircraft, like a cockpit or flight instruments.And we have DLC so we can use our Microsoft Points to buy additional aircraft to complement the Maule and the Icon. I'm hoping Microsoft does the Christmas Bullet next.

Anyone who thinks Microsoft won't pull the plug on Flight and/or FSX as soon as Flight DCL's fail to meet projections need to look at Microsoft's "MSN Direct" product.I paid $250 for a GPS that used this service and $200 for lifetime service relying on Microsoft to support their MSN Direct service for at least a decade. It turned out that the product wasn't as successful as Microsoft projected, so Microsoft pulled the plug on the service making my lifetime subscription worthless and greatly reducing the functionality of my GPS.

You love Flight, but only because you want to violate Microsoft's User License that I expect this "free" software will have??? And AVSIM will support this?

I see Aerosoft has a CRJ-200 for sale. Is that a separate product? How does it compare with X-Aviation?

Really looking forward to this ATR-72!! Hopefully it'll be ready about the time X-Plane 10 gets most of their bugs and performance issues solved.

I've seen the phrase "microtransactions" before in describing Flight. I guess it's a nice way of saying you'll be "nickeled and dimed to death".

I think it's going to be a talking paper clip.

I was thinking the exact same thing about how Flight is following the path of New Coke.You had the die-hard Coca-Cola fan (long term Flight Sim Fans) that loved the historic formula. But Coke saw they were losing market share with the younger customers that were migrating to Pepsi (gamers). So they abandoned their long term formula and produced the sweeter New Coke. The New Coke was a good product that tasted just fine. However their long term fans boycotted it because they lost the unique flavor they've enjoyed for years. And the Pepsi fans quickly grew bored with the New Coke and went back to Pepsi.After a few months, Coke saw the light and returned to Coke Classic. That turned out so well many people think it was Coke's plan all along.So the question is, since Flight has already alienated itself with many die-hard Flight Sim fans and I expect the Flight results to be less than dazzling with the majority of the Gaming crowd, will Microsoft go back to Classic Coke with FSXI? Or just abandon the whole Flight Sim product line??

Do you get 50 Microsoft Points every time you say something good about Flight? Not that there's anything wrong with that. That's 50 more Microsoft Points than my Gamertag account will ever have.