I own several flight simulators - Fly2k, FlyII, FU2 and FU3 and MSFS2000. But I find myself sticking to FU3 the most simply because it is the most playable simulation. The rest of the simulations take up more than 90% of time in trying to tweak them, patch them and so on to try to make them acceptable in playability. But with FU3, I just fire it up and I'm ready to go with no worries about performance, patching etc. (yes, one single patch is required for it).

Graphics - What amazes me is that even 4 years after this product was produced, other sims are still trying to catch up to FU3 in many respects. It has the best terrain graphics (at 4 meters / pixel resolution .. compare that to Fly's and MSFS resolution of around 15 to 30 meters/pixel). You can almost see every house and tree even at low levels unlike blurred textures in Fly and MSFS. FU2 has the San Francisco region and FU3 has the Seattle region. You can import the FU2 region into FU3 as well.

ATC - other sims ATC is practically non-existant unless you use 3rd party add ons. FU3 ATC is not only realistic sounding, but has witty humor in it as well. Taxi away from the taxiways on to the grass and ATC will tell you .. "we appreciate you mowing our grass, but please keep the a/c on the concrete"! It's little things like this that make this an immensely enjoyable sim.

Aircraft - FU3 admittedly does not have as wide a selection as other sims, but the selection is well thought out which range all the way from a cessna 172 to a beechjet. You can download the SR-71 blackbird too if you're a speed demon. The flight models are pretty good compared to the default flight models in MSFS. While taking a demo in a real cessna 172, I was reminded of the cessna 172 in FU3 (and not the cessna's in the other sims).

Weather - best weather modelling too. Has fronts, great CB clouds, stormy weather, air turbulence etc. This kind of modeling is non-existant in other sims.

Misc - you can play adventures like searching for lost hikers etc. Watch out for bigfoot! He can sometimes be seen roaming the jungles (yes, he's animated). Hey look! Is that a crop circle I see down there ?! And UFO's ? ... Yes, there is some "bozo the clown" factor to this sim, but that does not mean it is not a serious sim. It's a very serious sim and great learning tool. Comes with a decent manual and good support for it from fans on www.avsim.com.

Damage modeling - Only FU3 has any decent damange modeling where your a/c rips apart into several peices if you crash - unlike other sims where you might just get a pop-up message box saying "a/c damaged". Personally, I would have loved to see fire and smoke, and headless passengers with guts spilling out .. but still .. this is the best damage modeling you can get in a general aviation sim.

Performance - On my 128mb PC133 ram , geforce2mx 32mb video card and 825Mhz Duron, I get about 12-14 frames per second consistently with no stutters with all graphics sliders maxed out (let's see FlyII or MSFS2k match that!). That's much better performance than you can expect in other sims for such high level of detail. Best of all, you can probably find this sim in the $10 range compared to other sims in the $40 - $60 range.

Some cons - limited flying area and a/c. Default a/c panels are not that great but some of the new downloadable ones are pretty good. Since the developer is out of business, it is no longer officially supported. However, unofficial support from fans is still available at avsim.com.

Recommended: Yes

Version Played: Released
Operating System: Windows
CPU: AMD Athlon K7
CPU Speed (MHz): over 600
RAM (MB): 128
Best Played With/Intended For: Single Player
Graphics Card Family: nVidia geForce 256