I worked on this but left a year ago. It was a product formerly by Sidewalk Labs and ported to work within Google Earth for over 2 years. Pretty sure it's abandoned now.
> Simplified flight physics: The flight simulator is designed for casual exploration rather than high-fidelity aerodynamic training.
Google made flying possible with 6 controls only, and it's a feature!
It works normally, but they indeed have no busines helping you prepare for ATP license exam with beautiful maps in the browser
It'a an arcade game and it's fun
Outside of Google, around that time, I used Google Earth for a 3D visualization tool for real flight data recorders, integrated into a larger browser-based system.
(Stack: Google Earth Plugin did the heaviest lifting, especially before there were better ways to render 3D in a browser window. The frontend used JS, HTML for instruments, and some kludges to work around some limitations of off-label use of Plugin. The backend was in Scheme, and retrieving and serving up cached data for this was one of the simplest of the things that the Scheme did in that large system. Aircraft 3D models were off-the-shelf, which I tweaked lightly in (IIRC) Google SketchUp.)
Spent a long time as a kid doing so. I still use Google Earth "Pro" today, so much better than the webapp.
Because the competition is already fierce. There's MS Flight Simulator and X-Plane on the commercial side, Flightgear on the open source side and geo-fs.com on the free-to-play side.
There is not much Google can actually gain from making their own flight simulator.
Grand Theft Auto is now doing it, but Google Earth would make more sense because it can bring a more realistic environment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1szcl5i/google_...
The place where I worked had a Keyhole machine for pulling up satellite maps and doing animations back when this was considered borderline science fiction.