RealFlight RF8 Horizon Hobby Edition

A Favorite Flight Sim Adds Your Favorite Aircraft

- Andrew Griffith

The RealFlight 8 flight simulator has fast graphics, excellent flight physics, plus virtual reality (VR) integration, and when I reviewed it, I wondered what the company could possibly do to make it better. The answer showed up at my front door in the form of RealFlight 8 Horizon Hobby Edition.

The Horizon Hobby Edition keeps all the things we have come to know and love about RealFlight. The vast choice of aircraft, numerous flying sites, float flying, night flying, multiplayer rooms, and even VR, those and more are all still there. This version also has a collection of some of the most popular airframes in the industry: Blade helicopters, E-flite and ParkZone park fliers, and some popular models from Hangar 9 are now part of the base feature set. The sim also includes aircraft equipped with AS3X and SAFE, allowing pilots to experience these flight stabilization technologies before they buy the models.

UNIQUE FEATURES

RealFlight 8 has set the bar for RC flight simulators for several years with excellent flight physics and with graphics that have evolved in complexity and leverage the ever-increasing capability of PC graphics cards and displays. Another stunning development that accompanied the release of the original RF8—and one that continues with RF8 Horizon Hobby Edition—was the fully immersive VR implementation. VR allowed users to combine RealFlight with a set of Oculus Rift VR goggles and step into the flight simulator world in a way never before possible. The first time I tried VR with RealFlight, I felt as if I had gotten sucked into my computer, just like in the movie Tron.