Google just made its flight simulator accessible to everyone with a web browser

When I was eight years old, I flew a 747. Not a real one, but it felt close enough at the time. My grandfather was a career pilot who in his retirement taught at the Pan Am Flight Academy in Miami and I got to be a student for a day. With his guidance, I got to soar across the globe.

The feeling of flying over the earth was pretty well replicated in the simulator and it’s one you can now get a bit of with the Google Earth flight simulator in your web browser, with no lessons required and nothing to download.

Google announced that it has freed its flight simulator from desktop-only mode and made it available to use on browsers.

To launch yourself into the atmosphere, go to Google Earth and click Explore Earth, then in the menu bar open Tools and select Flight Simulator, and you’re off. Be sure to consult Google’s help page for the flight simulator for keyboard shortcuts for flight controls and navigation. (They’re also below.)

Before your first flight, I have a few tips from my own experience. If things are looking flat instead of photorealistic, go back to the menu bar, go to View and change the basemap style from Map to Satellite. Also, select a spot on Google Earth before you take off. The first time I tried it, I was in the middle of an ocean. If you spin out and then hurtle to the ground, as I did (apologies to the memory of my grandfather), you’ll be able to click “You crashed! Restart” to get back to a playable altitude.

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And, lest you think you can swoop in and save a plane full of people if you’re on a flight where the pilot and co-pilot become incapacitated, a la any one of dozens of summer blockbusters, Google cautions that the flight simulator is “designed for casual exploration” and not “high-fidelity aerodynamic training.”