It was back in the very early 70s, while PCs were still a twinkle in the eye of their designers, that I came across one of the first flight simulators on a mini-computer.    It was a wire frame, green screen variety with almost no semblance of reality and the aircraft (that one never saw) was notoriously difficult to fly.  Some years later I was the proud owner of an Apple IIe computer that came with a similar flight simulator, slightly better in performance but still difficult to control and not really very exciting.   Between then and now, however, flight simulators have improved enormously by taking advantage of the improved performance in successive generations of PC.  A couple of years ago Microsoft brought out FS2002 that they claimed "was as real as it gets" and there is no doubt that it offered very much more in the way of facilities than earlier versions.  So effective was the simulation of the flight characteristics of aircraft included in the application that it was allegedly adopted to provide additional pre-flight training to US military pilots.  Despite the improved performance, however, there was a degree of artificiality about the scenery.  Although this bore a superficial resemblance to the country over which one was supposed to be flying landmarks were notoriously absent, or minimised and not quite in the right position.    Then, in 2002, came a breakthrough with scenery reality as far as the United Kingdom was concerned.   To mark the millennium a company known as Get Mapping carried out an aerial survey of the UK, photographing the whole of England and Wales from a height of 5000-5500 feet.  This provided a seamless aerial map of the UK that was taken by another enterprise to provide what is known as VFR (Visual Flight Rules) scenery for FS2002.   When the scenery is draped over a "mesh", an electronic framework depicting heights above sea level, then the scenery takes on a 3D characteristic that is quite awesome.   With other scenery designers providing major 3D landmarks, functional airports with landing aids,  and with GPS navigation, instrument landing systems, air traffic control and additional AI aircraft flown by the computer, flight simulation is much more than a game and has developed a number of useful applications.  Follow the links below to visit flight simulation websites or to see further screenshots taken from FS2002 with VFR scenery.  The images above are:

Left "Final approach to runway 27R at Heathrow"; Right "Over Llyn Peris, Mount Snowdon in sight"