Every time I see something like this I think I should open source my masters thesis in aerospace engineering. It was an helicopter simulator implemented in (ancient, numarray) python. At least it could be an starting point for someone else although it's written in spanish (damn!). I think that the flight dynamics are much better than anything else I have seen on the wild. It had an interface with FlightGear. I just have written a friend of mine that teaches at my university to ask about copyright...