I have crashed a plane into Google HQ, oh well

Google have released a flight sim. Or, to be more accurate, they've made an experimental Google Earth-based flight sim into a toy you can play in a web browser. The view is taken over with the glowing green lines of a classic flight HUD. You control pitch and yaw with arrow keys (but it works better with your mouse) and heave your thrust up 'n' down with the PageUp and PageDown keys. It is as if you are flying a plane. Wow.

You can visit incredible places in Google's sky bus, such as Mountain View, California. A beautiful municipality, home to many large technology corpor– hang on, something is... oh no, would you look at that. We're losing altitude, the Aerogoog is plummeting. Mayday? I think we say mayday. We're on a collision course with – oh my, what are the chances – somebody should do something, oh heavens, what terrible luck.

The tumbling of my virtual airtube into the headquarters of the world's biggest magic phonebook may cause some alarm among sensitive readers. Please, do not be afraid. Crashing planes in flight simulators is one of the simplest and most ancient joys of PC gaming. I have been crashing pretend planes into false roads and bridges since I was a boy sitting at my uncle's Gateway 2000. This is not something the legacy of Osama Bin Laden can rob from me. It is the right of every immature player of videogames to throw their protagonist off a cliff, or into some spikes. So it is with the occasional Cessna, cast down into the London Stock Exchange.

This is only one of the many valid ways to approach a flight simulator. There are those who indulge in the most serious form of play, setting up whole virtual airlines with a community of air traffic controllers and instructors and co-pilots, all chatting on dedicated "radio" channels using the proper lingo of the industry. They commit fully to the role, and treat each flight as a learning opportunity, each smooth landing as a small victory, their minds sharply attuned to their instruments and their static-voiced colleagues.

This I love, I have even flown with one of these players many years ago. But Google Flight Sim is not that sort of experience. It is a neat gimmick attached to Google's equal parts impressive and alarming mission to take one big photo of the entire globe. To take this experimental flyboy feature at all seriously would be to sacrifice the true gift put in front of us today: you can crash this plane into anything you want.

You don't have to be a crashy sassy, obviously. Here's me also zipping through the Grand Canyon.

Here I am taking Larry Page's personal fake jet over the low resolution heads of fishermen in Hạ Long Bay, Vietnam.

You can soar over the Himalayas. That's pretty cool.

But if you think I would not also end these flights by hurtling myself firmly into the mountains or the tropical ocean, friend, you are mistaken. The Googledart has no passengers. It is made of data and hubris. It deserves to burn at the end of every journey. 

If you want to take a tumble, be my guest. Just head to Google Earth, click "Explore Earth", and then Tools > Flight Simulator. I waited until now to tell you that because I want you to read my articles.