Regarding the flight models, the feeling of Flight is pretty good. I’d actually say it feels improved over FSX. The turbulence and dynamic motion is nice and there is even drag modeled by cross controlling and attempting forward slips. I tried some crosswind landings with the upwind wing down and cross controlled rudder and the side-slipping appeared to be a fair representation. Stalls and spins are merely OK. The RV-6A seems to be supernaturally adverse to accelerated stalls. You can roll the RV-6A into a 70 degree bank at any airspeed, haul back fully on the elevator and maintain that bank angle and altitude with full aft deflection of the elevator indefinitely. I would expect a fairly pronounced stall break at such a high G-loading and such a low airspeed (65 knots). Planes do seek their trimmed airspeed in a series of ever decreasing oscillations, which is encouraging. While the Maule will stall under sustained high-G banking, I was not able to get it to spin using traditional pro-spin inputs. I would expect the Maule would be easy to spin. The Stearman seems the most spinnable, although sustained inputs are required to keep it spinning. Releasing all of the controls causes it to exit the spin instantly. You would expect the Stearman would require anti-spin corrective actions to exit a spin. So the flight model at the fringes (stalls and spins) remains suspect in Flight just as it was in FSX.
The included (free) Icon A5 is actually a neat little airplane from a player’s perspective. It is intended as a VFR only aircraft and with the ability to land on airfields or water it does open up a lot of mission capabilities.
If the gamers stick around long enough to explore some of the Flight missions, they will actually learn a few things. The missions where you do aerobatics are actually pretty well done, as are some of the tutorials on things like the VASI and how to land the Icon A5. The most distracting thing is the mission text in the middle of the screen instead of being discretely placed at the top or bottom. There are glimmers of goodness in Flight that could and should have been expanded prior to this thing going LIVE (pun intended). Where they could have strung together an interesting and challenging career, you are instead left with repetitive tasks that quickly have you losing the faith.
