Leco

Well, as it has recently been published on several sites around the Internet, there is an easter egg which has been discovered in Google Earth that enables a flight simulator. Well, I have been trying it and although it is very basic, it is absolutely amazing. To start it, you need to press Ctrl-Alt-A (or Cmd-Ald-A in a mac) and it will show you a dialog box to pick the plane and starting location. And that is basically all that its needed.

Although not a very advanced flight simulator, it is extremely fun to fly over cities with all the real satellite imagery, and what’s best, with all the 3D buildings directly from Google Earth! I think it is very easy to switch from a “mapping” application and just add some movement and physics functions to turn it into a flight sim, but the result is absolutely amazing. Check out the pics!

New York city

And why not fly over your house? or on top of the Aztec stadium? and land on Av. Reforma!

And what amazes me the most, is how the flexibility of Google and the power of communities is enabling it to release all of this cool stuff, but at the same time it is starting to compete with a new set of players… If they only add a bit more code and make it a little more complete, why buy a flight sim game if you can play this for free and with real, updated data!? Only God knows what will happen with Google as it keeps on groing.