Google Flight Simulator

simondanerd

Fun fact: you can fly through the entirety of the Great Wall of China! Spent a long time as a kid doing so. I still use Google Earth "Pro" today, so much better than the webapp.

wwizo

Another nail to Xbox (MS game studios) coffin :)

gacgacgac

While this doesn't do anything to threaten MS flight simulator, it's still charming. Google Earth is a delight to experience in VR if you ever get the chance, and the flight sim mode is likewise.

maxlin

Took them long enough to add it to the web app too. Bit disappointing how lazy the implementation is though, you never fall out of the sky even with throttle at 0%. Making the most basic flight physics even ignoring aerodynamics really isn't that hard

ozaiworld

Fun fact: you can also generate 3D buildings in Google Earth: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/earth/gener... I worked on this but left a year ago. It was a product formerly by Sidewalk Labs and ported to work within Google Earth for over 2 years. Pretty sure it's abandoned now.

smashah

Am I tripping or was this in Google Earth ages ago? I distinctly remember flying SU-27 on Google Earth map like a decade or more ago.

modeless

Unfortunately, whoever did the controls for this doesn't understand how airplanes work.

thimabi

I wonder why Google doesn’t bother competing with Microsoft in the flight simulation niche. All that Google Maps data would be pretty cool to use for that purpose, but instead we’ve got only this toy feature inside Google Earth.

neilv

This is fun, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google did something like this a couple decades ago, as a 20% Project. Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system. (Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. The frontend used JS, HTML for instruments, and some kludges to work around some limitations of off-label use of Plugin. The backend was in Scheme, and retrieving and serving up cached data for this was one of the simplest of the things that the Scheme did in that large system. Aircraft 3D models were off-the-shelf, which I tweaked lightly in (IIRC) Google SketchUp.)

rivetfasten

Cool, I'll have to try it in the next 18 months before they turn it down.

MrCoffee7

It doesn't seem to work very well - my plane is spinning around like crazy and I can't stop the spinning.

chombier

Gimbal lock?

blinky88

If only they took this seriously as a competitor to Microsoft Flight Simulator... Or licensed the photogrammetry to X-Plane. But I guess that’s asking too much of Google.

fragmede

Next up: Google driving simulator.

willguest

lovely, but needs sound and an altimeter. i went flying over NZ, the controls got really laggy, hence the chaotic experience... https://filebin.net/jltba21fn87ea5pm

satvikpendem

Do people in the comments not realize this is a very old feature from desktop Google Earth that's just now being brought to the web version? I see so many joke comments or those simply out of the loop thinking this is something new, it's not.

butlike

This is wonderful. It would be cool if I could take off from an airport. Maybe I search an airport, and with that one "selected in search results", choose "Tools > Flight Simulator" and it starts me from the ground.

simplesocieties

It's a fun toy program but calling this a flight simulator is doing a disservice to the communities and efforts putting in an immense amount of work to make actual flight simulators.