July 17, 1997. Thirteen months after a group of people with a combined passion gathered, the first release of a new, open source flight simulator was unveiled to the public, called Flight Gear. Being open source, anyone could and can dig into the program to see how things are done and make edits or improvements. Unlike most other simulator, the community strives to merge addons into the program.
15 years later, FlightGear (we got rid of the space in 2001) is the best known open source flight simulator in the world, with users and contributors from all over the world. It is used by universities, companies and home enthusiasts for education, research and fun.
To celebrate FlightGear's 15th birthday, we decided to organise a screenshot contest. Not just any contest, but the largest contest ever held by the FlightGear community. Screenshots could be sent in until July 31. Two weeks of public voting followed. Now that voting is closed it is time to announce the winners.
August 17 - Throughout the past two weeks, nearly 500 people participated in the voting. Voters were presented with two random screenshots at a time, from which they had to pick the one that they liked most. This was repeated over and over again. In the end, 41845 screenshot pairs were compared! The screenshots were then ranked according to their pass ratio. The more a screenshot was prefered over it's partner, the higher it ended up in our ranking.
The four best screenshots can be found below. The ranking of each screenshot can be seen in the ranking list. A top 4 of each category and per-category rankings can be found in the gallery.
The winning screenshots will be used to promote the release of FlightGear 2.8.0 during the upcoming days. We would like to thank everyone who participated by submitting screenshots and/or voting for his/her favourites.
Happy birthday to all of you and congratulations to the winning photographers!
