Flight simulator project

Sort of a side project that I am working on is to do a modification to a fight simulator machine.
This machine was made by Fun flight LLC, with 20 degree of movement front to back and 360 on it axis. The motion of the machine is timed by the current position of video frame index being fed from an old style laser disk player.
Currently the machine has four videos to choose from; two live footage airplane videos and three computer-generated videos. The computer-generated videos are at least five-year-old technology or older and really look it.

With today computer graphics, I feel that the scenes for the flight simulator could be rendered in real time, with greater detail then those currently on the laser videodisk.

I am looking for a 3D software package(Windows or Linux) that will let me create, play back and have some type of API that will let me control the playback from another program. The other program will also control the movement of the machine and sound effects.

What you are basically asking for is software to do 3D rendering and pathing. There are several options depending on your level of skill etc. You also need a 3D database in addition to just the software.

Try Open Scene Graph, that has sample code which might help and has been used before in home brew flight simulation. There is also some sample data for it that might help. It supports both Windows and Linux.
http://www.openscenegraph.org/