Best Easter Egg EVER: Google Earth comes with Flight Sim

Steve Safran August 31st, 2007

The latest version of Google Earth has a little easter egg hiding in its code. Did I say little? How about a whole flight simulator? Mashable has the details, and sure enough there’s an instructions page for Google Flight Simulator. I have killed an evening flying around Kathmandu, L.A., New York and mostly into the drink. You need the latest version of Google Earth. To access the flight sim for the first time, hit CMD+Option+A on your Mac. Those of you in the dark ages with PCs, hit CTRL+ALT+A and then probably go reconfig some sysadmin batch filewalls, chron jobs, .DLL conflicts or something. I don’t know. Get a beer. Once you’ve uncovered the easter egg once, you will see Google Flight Simulator come up as an uncovered option whenever you launch Google Earth. I look forward to flying the Google Enterprise to take advantage of Google Sky. Below you see the result of my virtual flyover of Cambridge this evening, typical of my mood as I passed over Fenway Park. Most of my landings tend to end this way as the nose camera abandons ship at about 180 feet, spinning toward the ground at a touch under 220 airspeed. I’m good with takeoffs - physics and lift are on my side. Landings? You’d think gravity would be your boy… but it most certainly is not.

Come fly Lost Remote Air. You may, indeed, wind up on “Lost.”