Google Earth Flight Sim

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.