The FlightGear project has been nominated by SourceForge, and subsequently chosen as project of the month by the community, in 2015, 2017, and 2019. FlightGear's source code is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is free and open-source software. Around that time, the graphical front end 'FlightGear Launch Control', also known as 'FGRun', was replaced by a hard-coded Qt launcher. The project moved to a regular release cadence with 2-4 releases per year since 2016, with the first version under the new naming scheme being '2016.1'.

įlightGear reached 1.0 in 2007, 2.0 in 2010, and there were 9 major releases under 2.x and 3.x labels, with the final one under the previous numbering scheme being '3.4', since '3.6' was cancelled. By 1999 FlightGear had replaced LaRCsim with JSBSim built to the sims' needs, and in 2015 NASA used JSBSim alongside 6 other space industry standards to create a measuring stick to judge future space industry simulation code.

The first working binaries using OpenGL came out in 1997. FlightGear incorporated other open-source resources, including the LaRCsim flight dynamics engine from NASA, and freely available elevation data. Development of an OpenGL based version was spearheaded by Curtis Olson starting in 1997. The flight simulator was created using custom 3D graphics code. 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.

Its flight dynamics engine ( JSBSim) is used in a 2015 NASA benchmark to judge new simulation code to the standards of the space industry.įlightGear started as an online proposal in 1996 by David Murr, living in the United States. It has specific builds for a variety of operating systems including Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris.įlightGear is an atmospheric and orbital flight simulator used in aerospace research and industry. The project had its first release in 1997 and continued in development. ĭavid Murr started the project on April 8, 1996. 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.

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