Contents
Preface
I  Installation
1 Want to have a free flight? Take FlightGear!
 1.1 Yet Another Flight Simulator?
 1.2 System Requirements
 1.3 Choosing A Version
 1.4 Flight Dynamics Models
 1.5 About This Guide
2 Preflight: Installing FlightGear
 2.1 Installing scenery
 2.2 Installing aircraft
 2.3 Installing documentation
II  Flying with FlightGear
3 Takeoff: How to start the program
 3.1 Environmental Variables
 3.2 Launching the simulator under Unix/Linux
 3.3 Launching the simulator under Windows
 3.4 Launching the simulator under Mac OS X
 3.5 Command line parameters
 3.6 Joystick support
 3.7 A glance over our hangar
4 In-flight: All about instruments, keystrokes and menus
 4.1 Starting the engine
 4.2 Keyboard controls
 4.3 Menu entries
 4.4 The Instrument Panel
 4.5 The Head Up Display
 4.6 Mouse controlled actions
5 Features
 5.1 Aircraft Carrier
 5.2 Atlas
 5.3 Multiplayer
 5.4 Multiple Displays
 5.5 Recording and Playback
 5.6 Text to Speech with Festival
 5.7 Air-Air Refuelling (AAR; feature available past 0.9.10)
III  Tutorials
6 Tutorials
 6.1 In-flight Tutorials
 6.2 FlightGear Tutorials
 6.3 Other Tutorials
7 A Basic Flight Simulator Tutorial
 7.1 Foreword
 7.2 Starting Up
 7.3 The basic catastrophe: flying straight
 7.4 Basic turning
 7.5 Turning on the ground
 7.6 So, two methods exist to turn in the air?
 7.7 A Bit of Wieheisterology
 7.8 Let’s Fly
 7.9 “My Friend the Wind”
 7.10 The autopilot
 7.11 Security
 7.12 What then?
 7.13 ‘Pilots Fly Not Only On Cessna’
8 A Cross Country Flight Tutorial
 8.1 Introduction
 8.2 Flight Planning
 8.3 Getting Up
 8.4 Cruising
 8.5 Getting Down
IV  Appendices
A Missed approach: If anything refuses to work
 A.1 FlightGear Problem Reports
 A.2 General problems
 A.3 Potential problems under Linux
 A.4 Potential problems under Windows
B Building the plane: Compiling the program
 B.1 Preparing the development environment under Windows
 B.2 Preparing the development environment under Linux
 B.3 One-time preparations for Linux and Windows users
 B.4 Compiling FlightGear under Linux/Windows
 B.5 Compiling FlightGear under Mac OS X
 B.6 Compiling on other systems
 B.7 Installing the base package
 B.8 For test pilots only: Building the CVS snapshots
C Some words on OpenGL graphics drivers
 C.1 NVIDIA chip based cards under Linux
 C.2 NVIDIA chip based cards under Windows
 C.3 3DFX chip based cards under Windows
 C.4 An alternative approach for Windows users
 C.5 3DFX chip based cards under Linux
 C.6 ATI chip based cards under Linux
 C.7 Building your own OpenGL support under Linux
 C.8 OpenGL on Macintosh
D Landing: Some further thoughts before leaving the plane
 D.1 A Sketch on the History of FlightGear
 D.2 Those, who did the work
 D.3 What remains to be done
Index