New Flight Simulator on the block…inside Google Earth?

Yep, late last week the boffins at Google updated Google Earth. The flag­ship fea­ture was the addi­tion of Google Sky, an astro­nomy map­ping feature.

Also included was a little-known Flight Sim­u­lator. Very cool!

While not tech­nic­ally on par with Flight Sim­u­lator X as far as actual sim­u­la­tion, the coolest fea­ture is the use of Google’s satel­lite imagery. You have to pay extra to pur­chase third-party add-ons to get sim­ilar ter­rain map­ping in Flight Sim­u­lator… Google’s includ­ing it for free. Or is it the other way ’round…in Google Earth, the flight sim­u­lator is free.

Regard­less, an enter­tain­ing update; be sure to check it out.

And here’s some guides (via Life­Hacker):

Google Earth Flight Sim­u­lator [Marco’s Blog]
Flight Sim­u­lator Key­board Con­trols [Google Earth User Guide]
Down­load Google Earth