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.

It could very well surprise me. But as long as someone keeps telling me they have a duck, I'll make the assumption they have a duck.

The cost to buy computer software is insignificant. It's how much of my time I'm willing to invest to learn how to operate it, how to configure it to get the results I want, learning which keys to press to do what I want, configuring my yoke and other add-ons, etc. Almost every demo of Flight I have seen shows planes flying through obstacle courses in the sky or doing slalom through hot air balloons. And the write-up from Microsoft about Flight says you get a Stearman in Hawaii, and if you sign up with "Games for Windows - Live" you get the car-like Icon and a couple more Hawaiian Islands. Every Microsoft Flight webisode and screen shot collection for the last two months are labelled "Microsoft Flight's latest game trailer", "Get a first peek at the Microsoft Flight Game Play", "A first look at the Icon AS5 and various game play." If Microsoft doesn't take this product seriously, why should I spend time on it???And for everyone hoping that Microsoft will suddenly start treating Microsoft Flight as a serious Flight Simulation, here's a life lesson. You can usually predict what someone will do over the next two months by looking at what they did over the last two months.So I expect to see a super-duper slalom course in the sky add-on before I see an aircraft with IFR navigation abilities.

At a minimum, a simulator that out of the box will let someone learn the basics of flight with a Cessna, or let a more experienced pilot hop into the cockpit of a commercial jet and fly from L.A. to New York with all the navigation aids and basic ATC.And a simulation so realistic that with some minor modifications, it can become an FAA certified flight training simulator. FSX did this via Prepar3d and X-Plane 10 already has that as an option.

All the trivial things are what add up to the whole.I've been a Microsoft Flight Sim fan from the Sub Logic days (OK, I'm way over 30) through FSX. I've spent a lot of time evaluating the next simulator I would get, and with all the evidence available I determined it was time to make the switch to X-Plane 10. Now I'm a little selfish hoping lots of other people make the same switch to accelerate the growing trend of add-on creators that are starting to make items for X-Plane.

My Flight Simulation activities do NOT involve Microsoft Points, the XBox 360, or a "Gamertag" to identify me to XBox Live. I don't even own an XBox, although I saw in the videos from CES that the XBox controller works well with Flight.Of course, I'm over 30, so I realize I'm not in the typical XBox Live demographic. Maybe somebody can explain to me again how Flight is a serious simulation and not a game.

If Manhattan X scenery for FS9 sells for $30 today, do you think Flight will sell the state of New York scenery for less than $40??? If PMDG sells their 737 NGX for $70, do you see Microsoft selling their commercial jets for less than that? What do you think Microsoft will charge for the ATC add-on?I have no doubt that Microsoft executives have looked at what add-ons are selling for today for FS9/FSX and adding MANY dollars to that for the "superior" Flight versions. Why do you think they're giving away Flight for FREE????? I've bought many expensive things that were "FREE" up front. But there was always somebody behind the scenes that had already figured out how to get my money at the next stage of the product.

I have no doubt Flight will be great, especially for new sim pilots. And after a dozen or two add-ons at $40 to $50 each, it may actually approach FSX out-of-the-box functionality.After reading about Flight's piece-meal Microsoft Live sales approach, I decided to buy the increasingly reliable and functional X-Plane 10. For the ONE-TIME price of $79 I got the full functionality of FSX (i.e. world-wide scenery, thousands of airports, mutliple default planes, full support of third party developers) with the added capabilities of state-of-the-art graphics (the lighting is fantastic) and the ability to fully utilize multi-core CPUs. And I can buy additional planes, scenery, etc direct from the rapidly growing list of X-plane developers without paying Microsoft's huge markup that I'm sure they'll add to everything sold through their Flight store.

I bought a great GPS three years ago with MSN Direct, a Microsoft service that provided tons of current information including traffic conditions, gas prices, flight information, etc. After paying for the hardware as well as $200 for a lifetime subscription, I was told six months later that MSN Direct was being discontinued due to sales that didn't meet expectations. I now have hundreds of dollars of hardware and a lifetime subscription that is totally worthless.So, yes, Microsoft does come up with ideas that don't sell well, and yes, Microsoft does just abandon the whole product line when that happens.

Microsoft is giving Flight away with the hope that they'll make significant profits on every additional plane, every airport, every scenery area, every ATC feature, every aircraft repaint and every other little feature that together may someday approach the feature set of FS9 or FSX.But if the first few add-ons don't sell well, I'd expect this "add-on" market to be abandoned within a year.So is there a big enough market out there to make Flight add-ons profitable??There's two potential markets 1. The long-term flight sim fan who's built up their libraries over the years. I'm betting most are not going to pay a lot of money to start over with Flight with no guarantee that this product will ever mature to the level of existing features that we have in FS9/FSX.2. The new guy getting into Flight only because it's free. It's a big question how many of these will get past the "free" mindset to purchase add-ons, and how many will just get bored flying the GA aircraft around Hawaii and just set Flight aside while they go back to Warcraft.A company the size of Microsoft must be looking at sales goals of millions of add-ons to consider Flight a success. Keep in mind every add-on has to be priced high enough to create profit for Microsoft to cover the expenses of creating Flight, cover the cost of running the "store", and enough money left over to pay the creator of the add-on for their time and effort in creating the add-on. In other words, they will be expensive compared to price of current add-ons. I'm just don't see sales numbers high enough in the first year for there to be a second year of Flight add-ons.