There are many different types of flight simulators.
Some designed for professional military or civil aviation are designed to push pilots to the limit to ensure that they are able to handle any emergency that's likely to arise.
Think of the pilot who landed his fully laden airliner on the Hudson River this year.
He was an experienced airline pilot but hours and hours in the flight simulator had honed his skills to the maximum.
Learning To Fly So what about you? You might be wanting to learn to fly, in which case, initially you'll need a comparatively straightforward package that gives you all the instruments and the flying feel of some of the light trainers that you'll likely be learning on.
Gaming Or you might be a gamer.
If that's the case then you'll no doubt be wanting to fly some of the latest military jets, some exotic aircraft, such as the Bleriot monoplane or perhaps a heavy bomber or two.
Some flight simulators, Flight Pro Sim, for example, provides the facility to fly, either in formation or in combat with other gamers.
This is a great step forward and really ranks up the satisfaction and excitement level of this type of gaming.
Memory Usage In either of these cases, one of the modern downloadable flight sim packages will be right for you.
A word of warning though, some flight simulators are extremely heavy on computer resources.
A quick search of the forums will reveal that Flight Simulator X, Microsoft's offering in this field, has caused no end of problems and that some users have even been unable to load it onto their machine.
Those that can, find that it often runs very slowly, or crashes, due to heavy memory requirements.
The best flight sim is one that doesn't cause these computer problems and that enables you to fly dozens and dozens of different types of aircraft.
Take your time in selecting which will work best for you, you don't want to end up with a flight sim turkey when you really want to be up there with the eagles.