What flight sim is best for realistic carrier flight ops?

Janes F/A-18.
The only one with a working radio comms from ATC, LSO to bring you in, a christmas tree to fly yoru approach by, ILS and ACL if you want it.

I haven't played Jane's F/A-18...

For carrier ops FSX is pretty good. There is no ATC for carriers, and you can't start a free flight on the deck (you can do it in missions though), but most of other things were added by 3rd party addon devs. There are addons like LSO, ILS and TACAN for moving carriers, few high quality carriers, additional aircraft, mods that improve the default F/A-18C, and payware F/A-18E that is better than anything.

My poor landing:












No combat missions though.

Yes the old Janes F/A-18 was good but I understand it's quite a series of fixes to work on Vista.
One day....
Thanks,

Around the same time as Jane's F/A-18, there was another F-18 sim (by Dgital Integration) that had more detailed carrier ops with animated deck crew: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o87AspTb4cs

I never played it, however. I seem to remember that the rest of the game (campaign etc) wasn't very good.

It was not. But you can still buy DISH on gog.com.

You know, if they (Janes) could have made and F/A-18 2.0, with DX9/10 graphics and updated FM, that would have been the best jet sim ever . . .

For a "non-dynamic" career, their's was about as good as it got.

I to would have wanted to see a new Janes F/A-18 with todays technic. Sadly EA put Jane's down so that will probably never happen.

Yeap, an updated Jane's F/A-18 would be a dream come true, at least to me!

You know there are still people flying it in organized online missions together. :v The way it is currently is still the best carrier ops + combat mission-orientated Hornet sim out there.

FSX carrier ops are pretty good unless you hit the deck too hard, which will cause you to go right through the deck.

IL-2 has very good carrier ops and you won't fall through the deck.

. . . Except no LSO (USN/RN) or "glideslope" lights (IJN) for guiding in approaches.