FlightGear
free, open source multi-platform flight simulator
FlightGear Flight Simulator (often shortened to FlightGear or FGFS) is a free, open source multi-platform flight simulator developed by the FlightGear project since 1997.
David Murr started this project on April 8, 1996. This project had its first release in 1997 and continued in development. It has specific builds for a variety of different operating systems including Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris.
FlightGear is an atmospheric and orbital flight simulator used in aerospace research and industry. Its flight dynamics engine (JSBSim) is used in a 2015 NASA benchmark to judge new simulation code to the standards of the space industry.
History
FlightGear started as an online proposal in 1996 by David Murr, living in the United States. He was dissatisfied with proprietary, available, simulators like the Microsoft Flight Simulator, citing motivations of companies not aligning with the simulators' players ("simmers"), and proposed a new flight simulator developed by volunteers over the Internet. The flight simulator was created using custom 3D graphics code. Development of an OpenGL based version was spearheaded by Curtis Olson starting in 1997.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1163986. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1996 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “FlightGear” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.