Flying Club - PC

We’ve all seen those pictures of flying sim fans’ gaming set-ups on the web. Walls of monitors, leather seat and stick, a PC with enough processing power to predict the future. We’re equally familiar with the games they play: they feature enormous airliners, the latest military hardware, with no realistic detail considered too small to include. Airline and combat sims are the sorts of games usually developed by UK flight specialists Just Flight too. But what about something a bit less ambitious, a bit more attainable? For those of us who nurture the not-altogether-impossible dream of one day owning an aeroplane, might it be more worthwhile to practice piloting the sort of kite we might one day actually be in a position to own and run? After all, the desire to own a secondhand light aircraft is these days of equal modesty to the hope of one day buying a new BMW.

Flying Club gives you a choice of four of the most popular and typical light aircraft to fly: the PA28-161 Piper Warrior, PA38-112 Piper Tomahawk, Cessna 152 and the twin engine PA34-200T Piper Seneca II. The game is based at Shoreham Airfield, situated on the sunny Sussex coast and probably the most famous privateer airfield in all of the British Isles. The pleasant Art Deco frontage of the main building offers an appropriate backdrop to the jaunty, tally ho world of light aircraft enthusiasts. 75% of the miles flown by all the world’s aircraft are covered by general aviation craft of the type featured in this game, so it’s high time somebody made a sim that does them justice.

As you’d expect from Just Flight the attention to detail is so acute that this resembles training software more than a mere gaming diversion, indeed, the game includes the tutorials featured in Flight Simulator 2004 to help novices get started. So forget blowing Migs out the sky and flying holidaymakers around, it’s time to practice whisking a lady off to the South of France for a romantic picnic. more