I recently switched from Flight Gear to FSX. The Flight gear community is very passionate about the realism of their flight model, but because it is open source there are numerouse bugs and performance issues, many of which have to be fixed with coding that is tedious and I am not very good at it.
Mostly I fly GA aircraft like the Cesna 172. In Flight Gear, if I land too hard the aircraft wil bounce off the runway and nose up making for a very uncontrolled landing, (generally ending up on the nose of the aircraft once I come to a complete stop--often NOT in front of the terminal building!) Therefore, the landing approach has to be nearly perfect to be successful in FG.
The contrast in FSX is that even with the realism settings turned all the way up this does not happen. I can land a Cesna 172 a bit too hard and the aircraft just squats down on the runway. Also, taxiing in a crosswind is much easier in FSX than in Flight Gear. I have had the plane pushed around all over the place in a 10 kt crosswind running in Flight Gear, but hardly at all in a 16 kt cross wind running in the FSX environment. Overall, handling a Cesna 172 and landing successfully seems much easier in FSX than in Flight Gear.
Can anyone tell me if this is a lack of realism in the FSX model, or is the Flight Gear model over sensitive in an attempt to "prove" their superiority (ie, if only the best can do it successfully then our program must be better than the mass-market program)?
RDS