Intro to X-Plane
Organization will be as follows: First we will outline what the sim can do, then walk you through each menu, then walk you through the various flight instruments.
Once you are familiar with the menus and instruments, we will walk you through a first flight in a conventional plane, then give you descriptions of how to fly helicopters, the Space Shuttle, theoretical planes on Mars, and other stuff you only find in X-Plane.
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First: What X-Plane can do X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive flight simulator, and the most realistic flight simulator available for personal computers. It is the only consumer-level flight sim on the market that can predict how an airplane will fly based on the GEOMETRY (shape) of that airplane. While every OTHER sim has a visual model of the aircraft for "eye candy" and a DIFFERENT set of rules to govern the flight, X-Plane takes the SHAPE of the aircraft as defined in Plane-Maker and uses it both render the airplane VISUALLY as well as SEE HOW AIR WOULD INTERACT WITH THAT SHAPE to provide the FLIGHT MODEL. This means that in X-Plane, you can enter the design of the aircraft of your dreams, not knowing whether it can really fly or not... and then find out by taking it for a test-flight in X-Plane! In all other sims, you have to enter the performance of your design into the sim, so the sim can blindly spit that performance right back out at you. You learn nothing! X-Plane is being used by various aircraft manufacturers and designers to evaluate new design ideas on the personal computers before the planes are flown for real... the processing power that is required for this was unthinkable several years ago, but on today's PC's is obtainable at a mass-market price-point, making flight-performance prediction possible for $50.00 that has typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for custom-built software. So what can you fly on X-Plane? Try props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier. X-Plane comes with subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, sporting aircraft from the Robinson R-22 personal helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the supersonic Concorde and Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie. X-Plane comes with 38 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the internet. |
First: What X-Plane can do X-Plane's scenery is almost worldwide, with the entire United States, Europe, and Australia on the CD, and more downloadable from www.X-Plane.com. You can land at any of over 6,000 airports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building tops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs. Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts! Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists for the airports that you are closest to! X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with 35 systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, and landing gear at any moment. While X-Plane is the world's most COMPREHENSIVE flight sim, the CD also comes with Plane-Maker (to create your own airplanes) World-Maker (to create your own scenery), and Weather Briefer (to get a weather briefing before the flight if you use real weather conditions downloaded from the net). X-Plane is also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design or for the planes that come 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), user-customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery makes it the ULTIMATE flight simulation experience for BOTH major platforms. |