Google Earth's flight simulator

[The Beatles]

Not your usual raving, but a little trivia. You can adjust thrust parameters in the ini file under resources/flightsim/aircraft in the install location (~/usr/googleearth or something similar). Scaling the parameters up by 10^5 caused some interesting errors ("your plane broke apart during flight"), but so did scaling them up by 10^2. First of all, this is really useful; if you want to get from London to Budapest in about 5 minutes. But even more interestingly, it lets you climb right out of the atmosphere. Here are some pics:
https://students.washington.edu/jbarbero/img/?Qwd=./img/ge

Click on Full Size to see the pics. The image of outer space was taken at the significant moment of 1000km.

Indicated Airspeed was very low in orbit, so this was not a way to cross continents quickly. We still have to wait for rockets; so far, we only have jets.