Interview: Flightgear’s Curtis Olson

Flightgear is an Open Source flight sim that has been built up by a world-wide team. Here we talk to Curtis Olson about aspects of the project including satellite mapping and flight dynamics.

How and when did flightgear get started?

FlightGear got started way back in 1996 when a couple young, naive disgruntled MSFS users thought that writing their own open-source flight simulator sounded like a good idea….

Humorously, by the time any of us figured out what complete fools we were for thinking we could actually write an open-source flight simulator, we were so far into it and had so much time invested that there was no way we could back out and come to our senses.

Now we have quite a large international team working on FlightGear which includes people with phd’s, masters degrees, bachelors degrees, and even a few high school students. We have people from big names in the aviation and simulation industry helping out, and we have people with years of pilot experience helping out. We have people that became pilots after finding so much enjoyment in FlightGear. FlightGear is even part of an FAA certified Level 3 FTD (training simulator.) This is (arguably) a higher level of certification and more difficult to achieve than the certifications that midrange simulator training companies like Precision Flight Controls and Elite are able to achieve.

The lack of easy extensibility for the commercial flight sims is one of the things that would would drive your project along. Is there anything positive you can think of about the commercial products?

Sure, anyone can run MSFS or X-Plane next to FlightGear. You can see that MSFS is *really* hard to beat in terms of pleasing and realistic and detailed graphics. You can see that X-Plane also has nice graphics and a really interesting and effective approach to modeling flight.

FlightGear tends to appeal more to computer geeks and do-it-yourselfers than to the unwashed masses of Walmart and Best Buy shoppers many of whom may be facinated by flight and interested in aviation, but also may not know the first thing about being a pilot and operating an aircraft. To make money in software sales, you generally have to appeal to this audience.

FlightGear doesn’t need to make money because we are volunteer driven, so we are free to pursue often different and more interesting priorities. But that doesn’t mean we completely ignore the “average” end user. We have a long way to go, but we are continually working at improving the installation and usability aspects of FlightGear.