What are some of the best flight simulator games for the PC?

I'd go with X-Plane. MS Flight Simulator is no longer being updated although there are a ton of great scenery packs and (at this point) more numerous aircraft and add-ons than for X-Plane. That being said, X-Plane has far better flight dynamics and the third-party commercial add-ons are growing by the day. I particularly like the scenery packs by Tom Curtis (http://www.scenery4xp.com/Scenery_4XP/Welcome.html) and the aircraft from Carenado (http://www.carenado.com/CarSite/Portal/index.php) Besides, what other flight simulator lets you fly on Mars with realistic conditions and fly the Space Shuttle? The new version 10 of X-Plane is due out in December 2011 and looks to be AMAZING. Check here for some preview videos: Wow, if that doesn't get the pilot in you excited, I don't know what will.

X-Plane is the one that immediately springs to mind. Its dedication to realism can be shown by the huge amount of disc space it takes up: a typical install is over 40GB! The game can quickly grow beyond 100GB in data if the player wants to fly over more exotic landscapes, or fly more obscure planes. The first-person cockpit view is also something that must be seen: every last switch, dial, and button works the way it should with the click of a mouse, or with a keypress. Custom keybindings are not only possible, but often necessary to fly more complex planes. The game is every aviation nut's wet dream, and it makes it a pleasure just to fly a Cessna in a straight line for half an hour. Microsoft Flight Simulator X is often seen as a more lightweight competitor to X-Plane; its physics aren't as variable (you have to quit the game and edit a config file to change them) and it doesn't have X-Plane's fully interactive cockpit interfaces. What it does have, though, is introductory lessons and tutorials, followed by actual missions. FSX is also more frequently seen sold in regular retail stores than X-Plane. It usually takes up less than 20GB on the drive, and uses DirectX 9 to render the world (instead of X-Plane's OpenGL). This means that it won't run on anything other than Windows, which is a drag for Mac users. On the other hand, it is a generally prettier, more user-friendly game, and may be more what you're looking for if you don't want to get as hardcore as X-Plane allows.

For highly authentic military study sims, DCS are pretty much where it's at. Their A-10 sim in particular is apparently very accurate indeed. They also have a product called DCS World, that's basically a free platform/shared environment that their sims plug into. http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/ http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/warthog/

I use flight Simulator X-set up as my plane to practice approaches.  This time is cannot logged though expensive simulators can be logged.  With a force feedback joystick I can program in really bad weather that I would never choose to fly in.  It recently came in handy when I had to make a fuel stop and the weather had closed in.  I had no problem doing the approach to minimums and knew the missed approach by heart having practiced it 3 times the day before.  I landed, fueled up.  Contacted Clearance delivery and took off. I had practiced zero zero takeoffs too.  This was 150 ft ceiling and the practice was very valuable. The military had never used PC based simulators.  It had a new pilot who on his first training flight did everything absolutely correctly.  His instructor could not believe he had no flight experience before.  He told them he had several hundred hours on Microsoft Flight simulator 2000.  They started a pilot program (no pun intended) using these and of course it was a smash hit.  A $800 PC and a $60 program could replace 30 hours of flight time at $150 an hour.

I am happy with Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX), but there are also FlightGear http://www.flightgear.org/ and X-Plane http://www.x-plane.com/desktop/home/ FSX has excellent graphics, and is very widely used, so there's a community of people adding free goodies (aircraft, airfield detail) to it, and it has the ability to use servers, so that you can fly with other people. Downsides: a rather over-simplified flight model, so aircraft behaviour is not always realistic; and there are lots of reports of trouble getting it to work in Win 8. No longer being developed by Microsoft. X-plane and FlightGear are reputed to have better (more accurate) flight models. Am having trouble getting FlightGear working well with my joystick. Not tried X-plane.

I don't know if it is the best or even a good flight sim compared to these others but I really enjoyed War Thunder because it is multiplayer and set from WW1 up to modern. I briefly tried it with full realistic flight but after several spectacularly failed attempts to get off the ground, I went back to arcade mode where I belong. I quite enjoyed the basic fun of dogfighting with other players from around the world and the physics seemed realistic enough for me. Shooting off a wing with 12 guns in my Hurricane and hearing the instant feedback from the opposing player = much satisfaction. Arcade Mode might be a bit gamey for you Flight Snobs (jk) but there are options to set up for full joystick and throttle and you can get it to a pretty realistic state. Although last time I checked it took a video tutorial from a pro flight simmer to setup but boy did he dominate once he was done. I noticed the re-enactment and true realistic flight sections where you play out a whole historic battle were harder to find groups to play with (hours of wait time versus minutes for Arcade). I haven't played for about six months now so there may be lots of changes (I hear they have tanks now too, although who would want to drive a tank when you can fly a plane?). It's also free so its worth checking out.

FSX: Never tried, but vouched for by a pilot. X-plane: Tried demo, best graphics ever, but very large size. Worth the investment, as the main programme comes with quite a large array of aircraft from the c172 to c130 to sr-71 and even the space shuttle. Lots of add-ons available on the Internet. FlightGear: Totally free, but graphics and aircraft is limited. The aircraft that are accurate to X-plane standards are the B777, F-14, A-10, F-15 and Tu-142. However, you get a huge amount of freedom as it is designed to allow the script to be edited.

Flight simulation is an expensive hobby.The best softwares are all paid ones,and adding additional add-ons adds to the cost.If money is not an issue,you can go for X-Plane 10 or MS FXS or any other simulator.They are really good and realistic and offer a very good flying experience. But those who do not have pockets full of cash,flightgear is the solution.Here's why: It is fully open-source,and for the geeky ones,you get the full code that you can modify if you know how to. The flight dynamics are really good.I spent some time with FSX,and did not find its flight dynamics any better than flightgear. Some of the planes(the 777,the 787-8 and A330) are really excellent with almost every function of the real plane. You get real-time weather reports,virtual co-pilots,real-time traffic and what-not. They release a new version quite frequently. Their team is very dedicated.They have tutorials for every major plane,from start-up to touchdown and parking. In a nutshell,it is an excellent http://simulator.Do not for a moment think that it is any less that the biggies out there,for it is free.

X-Plane for civilian. Falcon BMS for the F-16. DCS for all other modern military aircraft.  I'm fond of Blackshark, but the missions get repetitive.  I have some stuff available for getting a sort of crude auto trimming in helos, and it makes using a centering joystick much more natural, in my opinion. I own A-10, but haven't bothered getting into it. I'm not up to speed on the newer sims based in old theaters, so I'll defer to others on that.  Oldy but goody sims... I still occasionally jump into WWII Fighters because it's always run on any Windows computer I've had and it's fun. Enemy Engaged modded stuff is pretty fun, but it's a legacy graphics system and I think the flight model has been hacked to its limits, but produces some squirrely yaw behavior.  Longbow 2 has a better flight model than EE, but is dated to the extreme and not able to run stable on most modern systems. I'm not sure what's going on with Janes FA-18 nowadays.  I heard someone figured out a way to do 32bit color on it, but haven't checked back.  BMS is so stable and sophisticated that everyone's probably moved over to that.  I know the head coder guy was over at http://simhq.com talking about it.   Speaking of older sims, I think Total Air War 2.0 is still around, free, and fun.  Very easy to learn compared to BMS and the DCS stuff, with a focus more on strategy and less on switchology, as we call it.