![]() X-Plane allows almost any part or system of the plane to fail at specified or random times, speeds or altitudes. My office is about halfway between the two airports, so I went outside and looked south-there was a large black cloud, and rain was falling on this desert country.Įmergencies are, perhaps, better and more safely simulated on the computer than they are in the air with an instructor. I had forgotten that I had turned on the real-weather function. Halfway there, I was surprised by the raindrops depicted on my computer screen. ![]() Once, I was sitting in my darkened office simulating a short flight from KLAS (McCarran International Airport, also in Las Vegas) to KHND. There’s also an option to download real weather from the Internet and automatically update your computer data to match conditions at the weather station nearest your plane’s current location. These forces are summed up, and physics is used to complete the flight modeling. The model plane is divided into hundreds of small areas aerodynamic forces on each of these are calculated many times per second. X-Plane‘s scenery includes more than 18,000 airports, as well as aircraft carriers, helipads on rooftops and oil rigs, and even NASA-generated terrain on Mars. This one shows the avionics panel as well as the exterior of “the-jet” by Cirrus, which is in a roll. Avionics vendors also use X-Plane: Garmin has a flight-training device built around a three-screen G1000 panel connected to a PC running the program. No other home simulator has that distinction. Each subsequent version offers vastly increased capability, and because of the extremely flexible and accurate way the planes are treated, X-Plane has been approved by the FAA to drive several commercial simulators that can be used to log time toward a license. ![]() Twelve years ago, I bought X-Plane 1.0, the work of one pilot, aeronautical engineer and programmer, Austin Meyer. True, simulators can be fun to play with, but X-Plane is much more than a game. You may view a home flight simulator as akin to a game. ![]()
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