Blackley's first objective was to code the game's simulated physics. He began by deciding on a programming method—in particular, he sought one that would allow aircraft to perform the "knife-edge spin" maneuver that he had witnessed at air shows. In 1995, he said that he had never played a flight simulator with an accurate sense of flight. He later described his belief that the genre had stagnated, and that flight games were evaluated "by implementation of the standard feature set", rather than by their enjoyability. 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. Higher-end simulators used a "Newtonian" system, in which algebra-based measurements of force vectors determine a plane's position in real-time. However, Blackley believed that neither system correctly simulated the experience of flight.