X-Plane Program

X-Plane is now the world’s most comprehensive and powerful flight simulator for personal computers. It is one of the most realistic flight models available for home and personal use. It’s professional version, similar to it’s home version, combined with specific hardware, is FAA and military approved to train professional pilots from the airlines to the military.

Here is a video of the X-Plane program basics to look at loading different airplanes, weight/balance, different paint jobs, airport locations, situations, joystick/rudder pedal/button assignment, weather and more. This is an overall view of using the program, the menus and understanding how to work with it.

X-Plane Program  Introduction

This versitility allows more than 1,400 additional aircraft models (such as those at X-Plane.org) to be downloaded from the Internet , nearly all of which are free. If those aren’t enough, users can design their own airplanes and test fly them!

The X-Plane scenery package covers the Earth in stunning resolution from 74 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitude. Users can land at any of over 33,000 airports on the planet. Weather is variable in X-Plane from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and micro bursts. Rain, snow, and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders. Actual weather conditions can be downloaded from the Internet, allowing users to fly in the weather that currently exists at the location of the flight!

X-Plane also has detailed failure modeling, with multitudes of systems that can either be failed manually at an instructor’s command, or randomly when users least expect it! Users can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, control cables, antennae, landing gear, or any of dozens of other systems at any moment.

While on its own X-Plane represents the world’s most comprehensive flight simulator, the installation DVD also comes with Plane-Maker (allowing users to create custom aircraft or modify existing designs), Airfoil-Maker (allowing users to create airfoil performance profiles), and Weather-Briefer (to give users a weather briefing before the flight when using real weather conditions downloaded from the Internet).

X-Plane is extremely customizable, allowing users to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for their own airplane designs or for the planes included with the sim.

X-Plane’s accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage), versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions), add-on programs (in aircraft and scenery editors), customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery make it the ultimate flight simulation experience for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms.