I was reading a review of HAWX 2 and was thinking of getting it and a 450 for use with my new 3d glasses...but anyways, I was also pondering the red bull air races and car racing games like burnout paradise, and I think a simulated airplane racing game might be interesting, kind of like hawx 2 except the players fly through a marked course through a 3d environment with jets, and possibly some power ups or mods or whatever...mostly the racing jets though, and also for games with flying airplanes through waypoints, the waypoints need to be way bigger. Airplanes don't handle as easily as cars, and also most players are less experienced with flying than driving. Also collisions would be neat, especially since airplanes are pretty durable as long as they're both going the same speed and direction. Courses could be marked by a tube of semi-transparent matieral, with probably enough thickness for 100-200 plane widths minimum for 10 players racing through an environment. There would be obstacles to fly over/under/around as well as turns to make by going the correct speed and keeping your nose up while also drafting and flying with the other players along with turbulance and whatever. This might also make a neat game mode for HAWX2, assuming it doesn't already have it.

I like the idea, but it's not exactly in fashion nowadays. A good racing game can take one of two forms, as I see it: It can either be a grueling simulation of the actual sport, as seen in Gran Turismo or Forza games which model the driver's experience unforgivingly, or it can make the operation of the vehicle trivial and add on game features that are more immediately intelligible to gamers, like Mario Cart or Split/Second.

There's a game demo out for an Apache helicopter game for XBox right now. I downloaded and enjoyed it enormously, but I'd say that 75% of the game is just flying the dang helicopter. The first few times I tried it, pilot error was a far greater threat than enemy anti-aircraft batteries were. If you make a game that really captures the experience of flying an airplane with the speed and precision you see in the Red Bull races, you'll be putting an awful lot of effort into building a game that the vast majority of gamers will be totally incapable of playing.

I sincerely hope that flight sims come back into vogue. I'd love to see some really good ones made, taking advantage of modern processors and graphics chipsets and generally rocking out, but even games like HAWX have a fairly arcadey feel to them, eschewing the brutal physics of flight in favor of ease of use and playability. In a combat game, that's okay, because you're using the plane's operation as a means by which to neutralize threats and cause sweet explosions, but in a racing game, the plane's controls are the whole game, and you can't cheap out on that without replacing it with blue shells and banana peels to keep more accomplished players engaged.

I remember playing a game called "GeeBee Air rally" (or something similar) many years ago (this makes me feel old now :( ).

Back in the early 90's I use to play a game called Chuck Yeager's Air Combat ( or something like that - all I know is the title had his name in it ) on a 50mhz 386 PC.
It was mostly air combat but also had a racing mode where you flew around pylons to see how fast you could complete a course. It was great fun, played it for many many hours. But you have to like flying since it was extremely realistic, even for back then, so you had to have skill just to keep the plane above the ground but still low enough to get the best track times.

I think alot of flight sims today also have racing modes, but I haven't played any new ones recently.

I think the current MS Flight Simulator even has 2 race modes: the Red Bull Air Race and the Reno Air Race (although I haven't tried it). I am also thinking about making a Air Race game sometimes (shouldn't be too hard ... already have a lot of code I could use for that), but would somehow mix up the Red Bull and the Reno approach: flying a tricky track with more than one plane at once. I think that would be fun (a network feature would (of course) be included as well).

An interesting twist you could have is a Solar Sailing race. These would be spaceships that use light pressure to cause them to move. Of course, you would have to speed up the time scale a fair bit, but it would be a unique game.