Instruction Manual
FLY! has been designed to replicate the sights and sounds of flying some of general aviation’s best-known aircraft with unparalleled realism. It goes much farther than that, however. The handling and aerodynamic responses of all the airplanes available have been mathematically duplicated, or “modeled,” with a level of accuracy that approaches (and, in many cases, surpasses) that of full-scale airline and military flight simulation systems. Extremely detailed terrain rendering, based on actual satellite imagery and topographic data, makes the outside view as realistic as possible, while the combination of photorealistic instrument panels and actual working panel controls (i.e., you can simply “grab” the appropriate switch or knob with your mouse) completes the picture and puts you right in the pilot’s seat. (After all - how many real airplanes are controlled from keyboards?)
Want even more realism? FLY! has a very sophisticated
weather “engine” to provide weather effects from innocuous fair-weather clouds to blinding fog, or the firehose rain of a thunderstorm.
With an interface as realistic as FLY!’s, you don’t need “yet another computer manual” (and, for those of you who want to learn about keyboard shortcuts and other “simulator only” features, those total nerds my esteemed colleagues over at the computer side of the house have provided an excellent one). Instead, what you’re holding is almost entirely a flight manual, written as though I were actually instructing you in the airplane (as I do in real life). In fact, I’ll make almost no mention of keyboard or even mouse commands unless absolutely necessary; since operation of the program is so simple and instinctive, I’ll just say something like “use the prop control to increase the RPM” or “tune the nav radio to 118.5 mHz,” with the assumption that you’ll simply reach out and do it.