by Bob "Groucho" Marks

An example- from 20,000 feet in the Piper Malibu, invert the airplane, yank it into a split-s and firewall the throttle. The let the airspeed stay pegged- way, way past Vne. A little message pops up and tells you this, when in reality the ailerons or other important appendages should flutter off. Now pull back on the stick (OK, yoke) as hard as you can. Does the gear slam out of the wells? Does the weather radar pod detach? Does the wing spar fold like a bad poker hand?

No, no, and no way- just a polite little note informing you that you've just over-geed the airframe, please do not repeat this. Not even an accelerated stall. What you have now is a cabin piston single with a head full of steam and awesome high-speed handling characteristics that I would put head to head against anything in European Air War.

What would make the simulated Piper's real counterpart rain its Bill of Materials on the landscape has just made for a great way to set the airplane down out of the weather in Fly. Even spinning out of the clouds a'la a certain recently demised celebrity will simply make loud banging noises and bounce around like a football upon impact with terra firma.

The flight model is suspect, also. The Cessna 172 and the Piper Navajo piston medium twin feel pretty authentic- the Navajo especially has a solid, heavy "feel." The others are a little weird. Don't get me wrong- at least they erred on the side of fun and playability, making the airplanes sprightlier than seems realistic.

Besides the aforementioned Mustang-trouncing Malibu, the Beech King Air feels more like a P-38 than a two million dollar flying minivan. There are other, more subtle discrepancies. The Malibu will dutch roll (when yaw- rudder deflection- couples into a roll) more like a MiG-15 than a straight winged bug smasher- In fact, the Beech Hawker bizjet, which should have some nasty divergent tendencies at high mach and altitude with the yaw damper off, simply will wag it's nose left to right like a happy puppy.

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This may seem pretty minor, and in some ways it is. The bummer of it is that Terminal Reality is this close to the perfect civsim in so many ways. I'm sure that the either the marketing or legal departments of the airframe manufacturers whose license Terminal Reality displays as proof of authenticity (remember that LockMart endorses Novalogic's stuff) had something to with the nerf hot rods in Fly.

There is hope for improvement, however, since Terminal Reality has taken a cue on open-ended code from Microsoft. MS's geriatric civsim standard Flight Simulator 98 has been kept afloat and improved upon by third-party and user-created add-ons. It has a rabid following, and as such has a huge brand loyalty buyer base.

Following suit, Terminal Reality is set to release a type of terrain editor any day now (badly needed) and there is already a 737 add-on. There are a bevy of bug issues to be worked out- after all, Fly is a young, complex program, but nothing that a restart won't unjam, and so far, you know something's wrong before you put all the time into a flight. Maybe some user will find a fix. A lesson is in there- "If at first you don't succeed, let other people fix it."

Which is a tad harsh. Fly is an awesome civilian flight sim, a great change of pace when you tire of taking SA-7 up the wazoo. Good, clean, fun- and nobody gets hurt. Not even the airplanes.

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