Microsoft Flight Simulator costs $60 and requires a gaming PC.
GeoFS costs nothing and runs in your browser tab.
It's a free online flight simulator built on global satellite imagery — the entire surface of the earth, rendered from space, available to fly over right now. Pick your aircraft. Pick your location. Take off.
Thirty-plus aircraft are available — from a Cessna 172 to a Boeing 777 to an Airbus A380 to a Concorde to, inexplicably, a Citroën 2CV. Each one handles differently. The physics engine models lift, drag, stall, and turbulence based on actual aerodynamics. The instruments are functional. The cockpits are rendered. You can actually learn basic flight mechanics from this.
The world it flies over is the real one. Major landmarks are recognizable. Runways are positioned accurately — 40,000 of them. Weather is pulled from live data and applied to your location in real time. Real commercial air traffic, fed from ADS-B transponders, appears overhead as you fly. Other GeoFS pilots from around the world are visible too — it's multiplayer by default.
Take off from LAX and fly south along the California coast. Depart Heathrow and cross the Channel to France. Take a helicopter over Manhattan. Fly the Concorde at Mach 2 across the Atlantic. Land on an aircraft carrier. Crash dramatically into the Swiss Alps and try again.
No download. No account required to try. No credit card. No tutorial forcing you through fifteen menus before you can fly.
Pick an aircraft. Choose a location.
Take off.