2.0 GB
The whole planet is your free, open-source flight school.
That One Thing
You can take off from almost anywhere on Earth, then keep learning until the cockpit stops looking impossible.
FlightGear is our pick because it feels like the flight sim we stumbled into and kept coming back to. It’s deep, open, endlessly tinkering-friendly, and still feels like a hidden gem.
Worth the cost
Free, or regularly available for $15 or less. Good developers deserve to be paid, and optional cosmetics, expansions, and premium extras are welcome. But we won't list games that sell competitive advantages, disguise a trial as free, or charge again to finish the core experience.
Ready to play
Playable and satisfying today. It can be unfinished; it cannot be unfun. We love supporting indie developers, but prototypes, broken releases, and promises of a future game do not make the cut.
Tested by PlayBound
We install it, launch it, and play it ourselves. We've spent hours building definitive editions and making multiplayer work, because a store-page claim is not the same as a game we can confidently put in front of you.
That One Thing
Every game needs that one thing we'd excitedly tell our friends about. It might be the mechanics, story, art, soundtrack, controls, community, or the way it brings people together. If it doesn't have one, it doesn't make the catalog.
FlightGear last verified against the bar on . Read the full standard →
FlightGear is what you get when a flight simulator is treated as a public research project instead of a storefront. It models aircraft, weather, and a planet-sized scenery set, and it does that without a subscription or a scenery marketplace. The first hour is not a tutorial in the Microsoft Flight Simulator sense — it is closer to sitting down in a real cockpit binder and figuring out which switches matter.
The payoff is scope. You can fly a Cessna around a local field, line up an airliner on a Canvas glass cockpit, or join multiplayer traffic over published frequencies. Aircraft quality varies because the fleet is a community: some planes are museum pieces, others are the reason people stay. Worldwide scenery via TerraSync is large; plan disk space the way you would for any serious sim, not a casual download.
It is heavier than a browser flyer and more fiddly than a console racing game with wings. Joysticks help. Reading the wiki helps. If you wanted arcade dogfights, this is the wrong catalog page. If you wanted an open-source sim that still takes the physics seriously in 2026, it is one of the few that does.
Most free ‘flight games’ are toys. FlightGear is a simulator with worldwide scenery and a living aircraft library, and it remains the open-source answer when someone asks whether they have to pay for that kind of depth.
Great if you want
Look elsewhere if
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Minimum
Dual-core CPU · 4 GB RAM · OpenGL 3 GPU · 20 GB storage
Recommended
Quad-core CPU · 8 GB RAM · Dedicated GPU · 40 GB storage for scenery
Yes. FlightGear is open-source under the GPL. There is no purchase, subscription, or scenery shop required to fly.
The base simulator is a few gigabytes. Worldwide scenery via TerraSync can grow into tens of gigabytes depending on where you fly. Treat recommended storage as a scenery budget, not just the installer size.
Yes, and it is strongly recommended. Keyboard flying is possible for a first takeoff; a joystick or yoke makes the sim much more usable.
Yes. FlightGear has a multiplayer network. Use published procedures and frequencies, and read the multiplayer guide before joining busy airspace.
Not in the photogrammetry sense. FlightGear’s strength is an open aircraft and scenery pipeline you can inspect and extend, not competing with a paid streaming globe.
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More screenshots and trailers live on the official FlightGear site.
Community
Official Discord
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Chat with PlayBound players in #flightgear.
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