In Hoops courses, the player undertakes a time trial through rings that float in the sky, with the option to enable a "ghost plane" of the highest score.

[6] The player attempts to use the direction of the wind, thermals—which realistically occur above areas that absorb more heat, such as plains and parking lots—and the orographic lift caused by slopes to stay airborne for as long as possible.

[5] In 1992, Seamus Blackley, who had been undertaking graduate studies in particle physics at the Fermilab research facility, was hired through a want advertisement that Lerner had placed on a bulletin board.

[10] He wanted the project to bear more resemblance to a playground than to a video game, and he sought to give it simple controls and realistic terrain to decrease the learning curve for beginners.

[12] Blackley researched physics programming in contemporary flight simulators, and he discovered that many used large databases of wind tunnel and plane sensory equipment information to dictate how aircraft would operate in prerecorded scenarios.

According to Computer Gaming World, Blackley did not seek to represent the equations with perfect accuracy, and he was satisfied when the results were consistent and the sensation that they generated was correct.

While attempting to meet this goal, however, Bickenbach said that the models he created were overly detailed, which caused the team to struggle with performance issues related to the high number of polygons.

[5] To obtain audio for the planes, Greg LoPiccolo and Tom Streit—former bassist and road manager, respectively, of the band Tribe—visited a Florida importer of Russian aerobatic aircraft.

[7] Blackley optimized his code by converting the mathematical calculations of air from the 3D game world into a "math-friendly space", during which time the Navier-Stokes equations are applied.

However, Takahashi wrote that "Blackley worked hard to inspire his team", and he described artist James Dollar's belief that, "in contrast to other Looking Glass managers, he didn't take over tasks and make others feel stupid".

[5] However, Doug Church later said that, while "the team [did] a bunch of very cool stuff, the FBO, the flight model, the instructor, the renderer, so on", the result "was almost like four separate programs, with no connection".

[11] Following the completion of the concurrently-developed System Shock, a significant part of that game's team—including Church, Marc LeBlanc and Rob Fermier—moved to Flight Unlimited to add connective material.

[4] Doug Church later explained that the company wanted to self-publish in order to escape the "treadmill of waiting for advances", which would allow them to make long-term plans without needing to satisfy the immediate demands of a publisher.

Jeffrey A. Kalowski, the company's vice president of finance and administration, expected that the game would recoup its development costs and make a return before the end of the year.

[4] According to Doug Church, the pressure for Flight Unlimited to succeed meant that the concurrently-developed System Shock, which was not self-published, received little attention from the company's management.

[4] Before the game's release, Shelby Bateman of Next Generation Magazine wrote, "1995 is going to be a real dogfight in the flight-sim and aerial-combat categories, and LookingGlass [sic] is betting its bankroll ... that it can capture significant market share from the likes of Microsoft Flight Simulator and the debut of Spectrum HoloByte's Falcon 4.0, among others.

"[4] Doug Church explained that, because the game did not feature combat and bore little resemblance to Microsoft Flight Simulator, the team spent "many late nights" on marketing strategies.

[20] In March 1995, the Boston Globe reported that the team was performing "11th hour checks" of the game to prepare it for shipment to a Midwestern United States Compact Disc manufacturer.

The game's European releases were localized with German, French and English text and voice acting, which was made possible by "close coordination with international partners".

[2] Frank Vizard of Popular Mechanics hailed it as "the new top gun of flight simulators",[26] and Doug Bailey of The Boston Globe considered it to be the "first real serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the genre".

"[30][31] It was named the best simulation of 1995 by Computer Games Strategy Plus (tied with Apache),[32] and the best of 1996 by Macworld, whose editor Steven Levy wrote that it "puts you in touch with what makes flying special.

[26] Buchanan lauded the fluid model for creating a "sensation of actual flight [that] is nothing short of magnificent",[2] while PC Magazine's staff commented that it makes "planes behave more like real aircraft than any simulator we have seen".

[2] A writer for The Washington Post called the game "[the] world's first truly easy-to-use flight simulator" and "a good entry product", in which "rank amateurs can just launch the program and start cruising immediately".

[21] The Washington Post's John Gaudiosi wrote that, while many games in the genre are overly complex, Flight Unlimited lets "those who aren't rocket scientists ... experience the thrills of stunt flying."

[39] Similarly, Buchanan characterized the Hoops courses as "incredibly demanding", and Atkin cited that mode's Trick difficulty level as "amazingly tough".

"[29] However, Atkin believed that only those "never happy without something to shoot at" could be disappointed by the lack of combat: other players will "be too busy choreographing aerial ballets, pulling off death-defying aerobatic stunts, or just enjoying a quiet soar down the ridge line to miss that stuff".

[6] Likewise, Ware called the non-violent gameplay "refreshing",[36] and Buchanan wrote, "If [you are] a battle-weary veteran of air combat sims, Flight Unlimited might be just the sort of [rest and relaxation] you need.

"[6] Bob and John Nolan called Flight Unlimited "the ultimate show off piece for your new Pentium", thanks to "unbelievable" graphics superior to those of any other computer game.

[6] Bailey wrote that the game needs "a real beefy machine" to run properly;[27] Atkin stated that the "massive horsepower requirement will restrict many gamers to lower resolutions and detail levels".

The team could not continue using the real-time computational fluid dynamics of Flight Unlimited because, according to Hantzopoulos, it was "all black box spaghetti code from Seamus".