Even after Michael Black retired from his gig as a commercial pilot, he took his work home with him—in the form of a partial Boeing 767 cockpit and flight simulator packed into a bedroom in his Oregon home.

It's not a game, either. That would be too easy. No, the kids are making a proper flight simulator, with hydraulic cockpit, instrument panels, the works.

Microsoft's Flight Simulator has for years been the most successful and prominent flight simulator worldwide. Microsoft Flight is a completely different take on the franchise, so much so that it isn't part of the franchise whatsoever.

Depending on how old you are, if you're a flight sim fan you probably cut your teeth on a series like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Falcon or Flight Unlimited. But did you know the world's very first flight simulator was built all the way back in 1929?

You don't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars if you want to own your own flight simulator. You can just do what this guy did and build your own!

Those of you still owning joysticks and jackets with elbow patches on them, today is your lucky day, because Microsoft just brought the Flight Simulator series back from the dead.

Microsoft's Flight Simulator series has been running since 1982. Hell of a long time. But news yesterday of the sacking of the game's development team cast the future of the series in serious doubt.

Microsoft are slashing jobs. 5000 of them. While most of those won't affect gaming divisions, some of them are, with sweeping cuts announced for the company's Flight Simulator development studio.