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It's one thing to climb into the cabin of your 747 every evening and take your jumbo for yet another tour of the airports of Britain. It is quite another to heave a Spitfire off the ground, navigate by landmarks and locate your home airfield somewhere in a rather barren area of America. As if this were not enough, falling victim to one of the most unlikely plots ever dreamed up for a sci-fi epic could transform your evenings completely.

The first and most important goal is to learn to fly your Spitfire. After that, you can attempt a variety of reckless manoeuvres or set out to save the world from yet another attack from misguided aliens.

Aviator is packaged in Acornsoft's usual folder, containing either cassette or disk and a number of useful documents. The 26-page manual is full of information on all aspects of the simulator. In addition, an enlarged keyboard control diagram and map of the area immediately surrounding your airfield are included.

The program will run with either keyboard or joystick input, though joystick control is considerably easier.

The code takes several minutes to load and uses most of the space available when running in Mode 5 - a peculiar choice in itself, since the display is entirely white on black and a Mode 4 screen would have provided twice the resolution.

Once airborne and at a reasonable height, it is fairly easy to fly about and visit the suspension bridge or Acornsville, two of several features which are plotted in simple line graphics as you venture round the pseudo-world created within the program.

It is also rather too easy to induce a sickening spin and end up in a heap in a field. This is a much harder simulator to fly than some earlier offerings, but also very rewarding, as it offers you the chance to fly under and around real obstacles, scoring points for successful aerobatics.

As a final challenge, you can play The Theme and attempt to protect Acornsville from marauding alien arrows which grow up in the fields.

Acornsoft has succeeded again in creating an ambitious program with the limited memory of a BBC Micro. All credit to the programmer for what seems a very well researched and executed simulation.