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MicroProse's Solo Flight II makes an interesting comparison with Jet. The most striking difference is that this is much more of a genuine flight simulator. Better than that, it features very high quality speech.

The flying control responses are more closely in line with the real thing and the instrumentation is similar to what you'd find in a Cessna 172 or equivalent type.

Orientation with the airfield is realistically achieved and it is quite possible to fly a conventional circuit to position yourself for a visual final approach and landing.

Happily for my credibility, I managed many successful landings and it was possible to judge the glide angle on approach reasonably accurately. Responses to control input from the joystick were immediate and conventional, and I was able to avoid any tendency to overcontrol.

There are two basic options: Flying Practice and the Main Run game. And you can select degree of difficult in both sections.

Flying Practice varies from clear weather to windy conditions to instrument flying with a low cloud base - there's even night flying. There's also an Instructor Option where a 'flying instructor' guides you verbally through a complete circuit - that's right, he actually talks to you. By the way, the Control Tower also talks to you on mail runs.

Apart from the flight instruments there are also landing gear and play position indicators, a fuel gauge, navigational information to show your bearing and distance from a ground station, and even an engine overheat warning.

Once you've mastered the practice mode you go straight onto the Mail Run game - either as student or command pilot. The aim of the game is to deliver safely five bags of mail to their respective destination. But the more bags you load and the more fuel you carry, the more sluggish your plane becomes - to the point of not being able to take off. So you've got to decide what load you can safely carry.

Your destination dictates the level of difficulty. The Kansas run is nice and flat with wide runways. But Colorado involves flying through rocky terrain from high altitude airfields. Each of the six States available has its own particular challenge and there are navigation charts for all of them in the manual.

Before embarking on a flight, the State map is displayed so that you can refresh yourself on the terrain and landmarks en route.

The game ends when you've delivered the five bags (you can load mail at intermediate points) or when you crash. A nice feature is that after every sector, the State map will display the route you've just taken.

I found Solo Flight II to be a thoroughly entertaining and reasonably realistic flight simulator. It doesn't have the dynamic game plans of Jet but it does have more realistic flight characteristics and navigational challenges.