Important Notice from FlightGear Developers
This is a help desk page for FlightGear Mac OS X, a free / open-source flight simulator.
We have heard that there are some paid products that use FlightGear, and their web site or a starting box seems leading you to this site for either downloading the binary or support. It's totally up to you for paying some amount of money for software and scenery that you can get for free. However, we have never received any donation or single penny on your payment for such paid product. Therefore we have no responsibility for providing any support for such products.
Generally speaking, it is better to get FlightGear for free and buy a good flight stick and/or a pedal. Needless to say, donation to FlightGear is very welcome :-) If you already paid for such product and feel very disappointed by knowing FlightGear is available for free, we recommend you ask the seller (not us) for refund. See the official statement for more detail on this issue.
Help Desk
We assume you have a problem in running / building FlightGear on Mac OS X. The first thing you can do for solving the problem is to read the documents including Jump Start Guide, Users Guide, and Troubleshooting page. If these documents can't help you, post your questions or problems onto our online forum or mailing list. We highly recommend you use either the mailing list or the forum so we can share your problem and its solution with other users. Posting bug reports and future requests are very welcome.
December 25th, 2006 at 7:23 pm I downloaded the game and when I double clicked on it, it didn't open why?! what should I do?! thnx
January 16th, 2007 at 5:01 am do you have mac os x 10.4 ?????
February 3rd, 2007 at 11:31 pm i hit start flight and nothihg happens, the program quits and then... nothing
February 5th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Justin, please read the Troubleshooting page and do as it says. If it doesn't solve your problem, tell me what the log says. You can see the log with /Applications/Utilities/Console.app
February 25th, 2007 at 8:04 pm Where's the resource file at with the paths and default settings? This is the .fgfsrc file on Linux
March 10th, 2007 at 3:09 pm your program is great and i think it has good potential, but i am having trouble downloading extra aircraft and scenery. i have a mac, and when i am done downloading a plane i get the folder and for SOME of them i get the random letters then .tgz , but others i do not get that. even if i do get that, when i go to the beginning thing when i start it , i go to advanced features, then others, and i click install add on data. i have tried both the folder and the .tgz document, and neither work. when i do the .tgz document, it says installation completed, yet the aircraft does not appear on the list of aircraft i can use. HELP thanks for listening, Peter
March 10th, 2007 at 3:19 pm one more problem, is there a gun you can fire on some planes, and if so, what button do i press? thanks
March 18th, 2007 at 4:38 pm Hi, I was wondering how to use the Auto Pilot. How do you set it up so that it flies toward the airport that I would like? Thanks.
March 18th, 2007 at 4:39 pm After installing a new plane where do I find it? Along with the senery?
March 24th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Sorry for my very late response. I'd not been able to access the network for more than three weeks for some network trouble. I'm totally disappointed with my network provider, but now everything is back to normal, so it's OK. Anyway, I'll answer each questions posted in this website. Phil, you can use $HOME/.fgfsrc on Mac OS X. Just mind that the launcher will overwrite the configuration written in .fgfsrc.
Dominic, I totally agree with you on that. FlightGear lacks the usability especially in terms of joystick support. There's a tool called js_demo that allows you to (re)configure a joystick device. I'm making the next release version with this tool, so be patient. If many users want this tool, I'll make it downloadable before the next release.
Peter, The file names of aircraft depends on where you download these. However, you can extract the tgz files manually and put the extracted folders into /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/Aircraft. If you don't use the newest version of the launcher, please download the latest one (r114) from the Downloads page. There's no gun capability in FlightGear at this moment as far as I know.
Mike, It's not Mac OS X specific question, so please read FlightGear Manual. I hope it helps you. Installed airplanes and scenery can be found in /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/{Aircract, Scenery} folders respectively.
April 1st, 2007 at 5:03 pm When i play FLightGear, there is no scenery. How do I fix this?
April 1st, 2007 at 5:10 pm nevermind, i found out
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:20 am How can i install new plane's ?
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:46 am i have a big problem i see only lines on my screen please help me!
April 6th, 2007 at 2:48 am when i try to put more aircrafts into the "aircraft" folder it says the "aircraft" folder can't be modified, how do i fix this?
April 6th, 2007 at 6:02 pm nevr mind, i found out
April 6th, 2007 at 8:10 pm how do i download more scenery???
April 8th, 2007 at 8:25 am I love this program, but I simply cannot get it to work on my Macbook. Some of the keys work and some don't. Is there a file I can substitute which will allow it to run on my Macbook? Thanks