Woa there! They embedded an entire flight sim in Google Earth ? That's a lot of work and pretty impressive for an easter egg, even when coming from Google!
I wonder how they justify the effort put into those things.. 20 percent time perhaps ?
There was a flight simulator hidden in MS Excel 97 as well, which makes even less sense. The only thing that sort of rationalizes it is that it's a stripped-down version of MS Flight Simulator.
Yeah well, when you have a flight sim in your program, you almost have to do something useful with it, not ?
I just wonder where they got the time to build it in the first place. As far as i know, it's not like Google had a flight sim in their portfolio before.
The early versions weren't so much of a flight simulator as a first person camera with plane-like controls and trivial physics. I'm sure they had a first person camera already for debugging and then just stuck a couple force calculations on top just for fun. For anyone who has done a 3D video game or simulation before, F=M*A level newtonian physics can be implemented in < 1 hour.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832185