I thought of a good use for Blu-ray's storage capacity on the PS3: A Flight Simulator!  Accurate maps of the globe require gigabytes upon gigabytes of data.  Take X-Plane for example, they offer one DVD for each region: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, etc.  These would all fit onto a BD-ROM fairly easily, with more space available for added detail.  Additionally, the Cell is quite capable of performing very detailed simulations of flight physics, down to the air flow around each part of an aircraft.  Furthermore, this would actually be a useful and cool application of the SIXAXIS tilt controls.

I'm talking about a real flight simulator like Microsoft's PC sim, or X-Plane, not something like Ace Combat.  I know this isn't exactly what the hardcore console gaming crowd enjoys, but flight simulators have their own hardcore audience, many of whom would be willing to buy a $600 console if it had the most beautiful and realistic flight simulator available.

Yeah, that would be pretty cool.

I think that I would probably pick that game up, of course I would probably prefer Ace Combat, but with the absence of that till 08, and if it was a great simulator, I would most definitely get this

To get the most out of a flight sim you need a high quality joystick, throttle and rudder pedals. Console controls don't really cut it for accuracy. In addition, there are dozens of add-on products, both hardware and software, designed for FSX and I don't see that changing. Not to mention that the biggest sim, FSX is owned by MS, which represents the overwhelming majority of the market.

In addition, any company making the switch would have to port their code. It would be far easier to port pc -> X360 than to the PS3.

That sounds like a great idea, but here are 3 potential problems which might stop it. Don't take this as a criticism, it's merely my analysis of your idea, which sounded great to me!

1- Can Blu-Ray hold all the data with enough definition for a PS3-quality game? According to X-plane's webpage, the full installation of the game takes up 60 GB of disc space.

2- Is Blu-Ray fast enough to stream the data from disc, or would the game need to be installed in the hard drive? Caching might or might not solve this. It's probably feasible to predict the data which will be needed depending on where the player is heading to, and cache it.

3- Development cost (X-Plane seems cheap enough at $69 or $49 with a discount, but a PS3 game might have a bigger development cost)

 Answer to 1: Blu-ray discs are not limited at 50GB, these are just the dual layer ones, there are bigger ones (although actually I'm not 100% sure that the PS3 can play them)

It really depends on alot of things. IMO, you could do uber-realilistic accurate maps of terrain without ultra high capacities of storage.

A great example would be a very old flight sim: Falcon 3.0 and Falcon 4.0:
Respectively, both games had great accuracies for what they offered. F3 had great Iraq war maps on 1.44mb floppies.

F4.0 improved it greatly, offering great realilistic maps of Korea on a 1:1 ratio, including most of Japan and Manchuria on 1 CD-Rom.

Accuracy doesn't have a whole lot to do with a BD-Rom storage media, as alot of the things (mountains, trees, temperature changes, ect) can be done with proceduar synthesis (both 360 and PS3 have these).

But I do agree: Next gen systems need realilistic Falcon 4.0-like sims. People paid $200 for Steel Batallion controllers, I'd pay $200 for Falcon 5.0 on PS3 or 360.

When I was younger I loved the flight games, but it seems they have went downhill over the years

I disagree, they have gotten a LOT better. The flight models are better. Just about every aircraft you can imagine is available as an add-on. A multitude of controllers are available. There is ATC and real time weather available. Maps are now based on satellite imagery. You can fly in a sky filled with other people over the internet.

I don't see it going downhill or not. Maybe your talking about arcade flight? Because as far as simulation goes, things are so much better. 

LOL sony haters out in full force already.

A relaistic 3d world would be freaking sick, all the jets ohh god id pimp the Mig-35 like its my last day on earth.

Ok Polyphony digital should handle the planes/physics.