X-Plane manual

The X-Plane Menus

OK, let's quickly go through each menu in X-Plane to see what this baby can do. Once we have gone through all the menus, we will take a look at the cockpit instrumentation.

File Menu

Open Aircraft
This works just like opening a text file in a word-processor, only you are opening an aircraft to go flying instead! Fun! Just select your favorite airplane, provided it is available on the disk, and go fly it! The aircraft file must be in the "X-Sytem" folder to be selectable!

Load/Save Situation or Movie
Just set up the location, weather, airplane, etc any way you want and save the situation.
You can load that situation again whenever you want. Situations are saved in the "Situations" folder in the "Output" folder. Ditto all that for movies, which are saved in the "Movies" folder in the "Output" folder.

Quit
Exit the simulator.
X-Plane remembers the nearest airport, weather, aircraft, etc. for the next time you restart the simulator.
The Location Menu

This starts you off wherever you want.

The "Takeoff" and "Final" menus let you select from every airport in the general vicinity. (About 100 miles or so). If you want to go farther away than that, then you should select location by Airport, where you can enter any of the 20,000 or so airports in the X-Plane database.

The various "Special Approach", etc. menus are more fun than a barrel full of monkeys that have had too much coffee, and then cooped up too long in the barrel, and then released at a fruit-stand. You can buzz forest fires in the B-26 water bomber and jettison the flame-retardant load right over the fires to put them out, try putting an F-4 on an aircraft carrier, try getting an F-4 OFF an aircraft carrier, get towed aloft in your Cirrus glider by a towplane, fly a helicopter (or the V-22!) to a building top, oil rig, or even a frigate pitching and rolling in the waves. You can fly the space shuttle through a complete, realistic re-entry sequence to landing at Edwards... and we haven't even gotten do what you can do on Mars yet! That's just here on Earth!

At the bottom of the location menu you can select your planet.. don't be fooled! The laws of physics are the same on Mars as on Earth (but with thinner air and lower gravity) and these variances are known to X-Plane, so the flight on Mars is just as accurate as the flight on Earth!

The Settings Menu

Data Output
This windows is extremely important and you must open it now. This is where you can output all manner of flight data to the cockpit display, a graphical output, a disk file, or even the internet via UDP. Here are some more thorough descriptions:

1: Cockpit Display
Do this to send data numerically to the windshield, where it is shown in real time. You can look at things like propulsive efficiency, engine power output, exact prop RPM or mach number, or any number of other things where you want precise flight data. This is commonly used for test-flying your own airplane designs.

2: Disk File
The data requested goes to the file "X-Plane.out" in ASCI text format. You can view the data after the flight by opening "X-Plane.out" with any word processor. After that, you may choose to import the data into a spreadsheet or graphics program of your choice for thorough analysis or printing or sharing with others.

3: Graphic Display
The data requested goes to a graphical display where it can be accessed by selecting "Graphic Flight Record" from the "Output" menu. Up to four variable groups may be chosen. This is a good idea for cases where you want to see control deflections over time from an artificial stability system, etc.

4: Internet
Send data to the internet? Huh? It sounds crazy until you consider the possibilities Say you are making your own virtual cockpit with many computers and monitors... or maybe you are making some type of motion platform... or maybe you want data to drive your own visual display system... just put an ethernet card in your computer if you do not already have one, and select the data you wish to be output here... it will be sent out over the ethernet cable by UDP protocol in such a way that there is basically NO FRAME-RATE HIT AT ALL... now you hook up the other end of the ethernet cable to another computer, and you have yourself a little network, with the second computer getting data from X-Plane on the first computer. Now you may burden that second computer with hardware or software to drive motion platforms, displays, cockpits, or anything else you can think of, and the frame-rate of X-Plane is not hurt at all since it sent the data to the second machine for processing! See X-Plane Internet Output for a full description of the file formats and how to make it work if you are not a UDP or network guru.

Internet Connections
OK, this is where you enter the TCP/IP addresses of all the other computers this computer is talking to for your little "X-Plane network" just mentioned above. This is also where you set up X-Plane to run with many monitors, other players, instructor consoles, etc.

Rendering Options Item
This allows you to set the graphics options for the sim. Set to higher color depths and texture resolutions if your card can handle it, otherwise leave them at the defaults. When in doubt, experiment! With all the video cards and computer and configurations in use today, we are not even going to TRY to tell you what settings to use... you need to experiment for yourself!

If you set the graphical load too high and X-Plane will not restart the next time you try to run the sim because of it, just delete your various X-Plane preferences from the "System:Preferences" folder on Macs, or the "System" folder on Windows machines. View files by name in a list and you will see the various X-Plane preferences at the end of the list alphabetically under "X". You can delete them safely.. X-Plane will just restart to it's default config when you do.

Joystick Axis Assignment
This is where you decide what each axis on your joystick does. For Macintosh users, this is a standard Input Sprockets interface. For Windows users, be sure to set all unused axis to NONE! See the General Controls section of this manual for a more thorough description of joystick setup.

Set Equipment Options
This is where you decide what each button on your joystick does, and choose any special hardware you have, such as radio stacks, etc.

Test Joystick and Equipment
This is where you can see how your joystick is responding, as well as see if any special hardware selected above is responding. You can also set the joystick damping here. For technically-realistic flying, all the damping should be completely turned off, and the joystick sensitivity cranked to full. Simulators are harder to fly than real airplanes, though, so you may want to add some artificial damping and lower the joystick sensitivity to make the airplane feel more realistic.

Time of Day
Use this to set the time of day for your flights.
Dawn (06:00) and Dusk (17:00) are cool-looking. Evening (19:00) with an overcast cloud layer is recommended for instrument flight (IFR) training. Time will advance in real-time.

Set Weather (Space, Atmosphere, and Water)
Note that you have slider control over the meteorological situation at various altitudes. These triple-sliders outline the limits you set for the weather at various altitudes. The "rate of change" slider controls how fast the weather is changing. The computer's internal weather generator will keep the weather changing until your limits are reached!

You can also fly in actual real-time weather downloaded from the internet! Check out www.X-Plane.com for the current location of the current file.

Conditions for atmosphere, water, and space may also be set. Don't slide on a wet runway, crash a floatplane on a Tsunami, or get distracted by a meteors! (Unless you want to, of course.)

Weights and Fuel
Use the sliders to set the weights and fuel you want to fly. Watch the maximum take-off weight! If you fly over this weight you are asking for trouble!

Realistic, Instrument and Equipment Reliability
=>Engine failures will cause immediate lack of power.
=>Oil pressure failures will cause the engine to slowly lose power and then seize
=>Vacuum system failures are realistic, complete with gyro tumble as the gyros spin down.
=>Instrument failures will cause the instruments to stay in the position they were in when the failure occurred.
=>Control failures will cause the controls to snap to the center position and stay there, simulating cable failure.

Sound
Sounds are set here. ATC verbal communications are possible if the appropriate speech drivers are installed. The window explains in more detail.

Warnings
This sets how "strict" the sim is. All boxes should be checked "on" for maximum realism. Check them "off" if you want to do free-flight without worrying about aircraft limitations.

Quick-Flight Setup
Quickly set your aircraft, location, time, and even a little weather here.

The Output Menu

Graphic Flight Record
This is where the graphic data selected from the "Data Output" in the "Settings" menu can be observed. Point the mouse at whatever part of the curve you are interested in (no need to click) and the numerical value of that data appears underneath the labels at the left side of the screen. Clicking on the "starting time" controls at the bottom of the screen controls how many seconds since data selection was made you wish to start viewing.

Low Enroute, Sectional Chart, Weather Radar Map, Textured Map, and 3-D Map
These plot the local area with your flight path plotted in red and black. The weather radar map shows fine details if you have thunderstorms selected in the "Set Weather" window. You may position your aircraft in various maps by setting altitude, speed and direction, then clicking in the map. The 3-D Map requires a pretty fast machine to run smoothly, but is a nice site to see if you have the hardware for it.

Approach Plates for the Local Airports Menu
Plots the approach plate of the selected airport. This chart is used for setting VOR, ILS, and ADF frequencies as well as planning ILS approaches. Notice the elevation of your airport! Fly an instrument approach and then open these windows to see how your approach looked. The View Menu

Many view options are available for watching your flight.
The letters in brackets are keyboard equivalents. Just hit those keys to get the views.

Enter/Leave Flight Replay Mode offers a video replay of your flight. In the glareshield some VCR-like buttons appear, which can be pressed to wind up or down, start or stop the replay, or study interesting situations (like crashes). If your monitor or videocard has video-out you can output the movie to a VCR. You can change the view of the replay with the usual keys from the "View" menu.

The Special Menu

Output one flight engine cycle
This saves an extended text file to your hard disk with all current simulator data. You can read this file with any word processor. This option is useful for people with an aeronautical engineering background, or the extremely curious. Use this data to check the simulator output, or observe loads or other data pertaining to the aircraft at the moment that you clicked on this menu item.

Instructions
These are brief but self-explanatory. X-Plane uses help-screens when you leave the mouse-pointer over an unclear subject for a few seconds.

Show Mouse-Click Regions This plots annoying little yellow rectangles where you can click with the mouse... it might be useful for designing custom cockpits, etc.

(next section)

OK, let's quickly go through each menu in X-Plane to see what this baby can do. Once we have gone through all the menus, we will take a look at the cockpit instrumentation. File Menu Open Aircraft This works just like opening a text file in a word-processor, only you are opening an aircraft to go flying instead! Fun! Just select your favorite airplane, provided it is available on the disk, and go fly it! The aircraft file must be in the "X-Sytem" folder to be selectable! Load/Save Situation or Movie Just set up the location, weather, airplane, etc any way you want and save the situation. You can load that situation again whenever you want. Situations are saved in the "Situations" folder in the "Output" folder. Ditto all that for movies, which are saved in the "Movies" folder in the "Output" folder. Quit Exit the simulator. X-Plane remembers the nearest airport, weather, aircraft, etc. for the next time you restart the simulator.				The Location Menu This starts you off wherever you want. The "Takeoff" and "Final" menus let you select from every airport in the general vicinity. (About 100 miles or so). If you want to go farther away than that, then you should select location by Airport, where you can enter any of the 20,000 or so airports in the X-Plane database. The various "Special Approach", etc. menus are more fun than a barrel full of monkeys that have had too much coffee, and then cooped up too long in the barrel, and then released at a fruit-stand. You can buzz forest fires in the B-26 water bomber and jettison the flame-retardant load right over the fires to put them out, try putting an F-4 on an aircraft carrier, try getting an F-4 OFF an aircraft carrier, get towed aloft in your Cirrus glider by a towplane, fly a helicopter (or the V-22!) to a building top, oil rig, or even a frigate pitching and rolling in the waves. You can fly the space shuttle through a complete, realistic re-entry sequence to landing at Edwards... and we haven't even gotten do what you can do on Mars yet! That's just here on Earth! At the bottom of the location menu you can select your planet.. don't be fooled! The laws of physics are the same on Mars as on Earth (but with thinner air and lower gravity) and these variances are known to X-Plane, so the flight on Mars is just as accurate as the flight on Earth!




The Settings Menu Data Output This windows is extremely important and you must open it now. This is where you can output all manner of flight data to the cockpit display, a graphical output, a disk file, or even the internet via UDP. Here are some more thorough descriptions: 1: Cockpit Display Do this to send data numerically to the windshield, where it is shown in real time. You can look at things like propulsive efficiency, engine power output, exact prop RPM or mach number, or any number of other things where you want precise flight data. This is commonly used for test-flying your own airplane designs. 2: Disk File The data requested goes to the file "X-Plane.out" in ASCI text format. You can view the data after the flight by opening "X-Plane.out" with any word processor. After that, you may choose to import the data into a spreadsheet or graphics program of your choice for thorough analysis or printing or sharing with others. 3: Graphic Display The data requested goes to a graphical display where it can be accessed by selecting "Graphic Flight Record" from the "Output" menu. Up to four variable groups may be chosen. This is a good idea for cases where you want to see control deflections over time from an artificial stability system, etc. 4: Internet Send data to the internet? Huh? It sounds crazy until you consider the possibilities Say you are making your own virtual cockpit with many computers and monitors... or maybe you are making some type of motion platform... or maybe you want data to drive your own visual display system... just put an ethernet card in your computer if you do not already have one, and select the data you wish to be output here... it will be sent out over the ethernet cable by UDP protocol in such a way that there is basically NO FRAME-RATE HIT AT ALL... now you hook up the other end of the ethernet cable to another computer, and you have yourself a little network, with the second computer getting data from X-Plane on the first computer. Now you may burden that second computer with hardware or software to drive motion platforms, displays, cockpits, or anything else you can think of, and the frame-rate of X-Plane is not hurt at all since it sent the data to the second machine for processing! See X-Plane Internet Output for a full description of the file formats and how to make it work if you are not a UDP or network guru. Internet Connections OK, this is where you enter the TCP/IP addresses of all the other computers this computer is talking to for your little "X-Plane network" just mentioned above. This is also where you set up X-Plane to run with many monitors, other players, instructor consoles, etc. Rendering Options Item This allows you to set the graphics options for the sim. Set to higher color depths and texture resolutions if your card can handle it, otherwise leave them at the defaults. When in doubt, experiment! With all the video cards and computer and configurations in use today, we are not even going to TRY to tell you what settings to use... you need to experiment for yourself! If you set the graphical load too high and X-Plane will not restart the next time you try to run the sim because of it, just delete your various X-Plane preferences from the "System:Preferences" folder on Macs, or the "System" folder on Windows machines. View files by name in a list and you will see the various X-Plane preferences at the end of the list alphabetically under "X". You can delete them safely.. X-Plane will just restart to it's default config when you do. Joystick Axis Assignment This is where you decide what each axis on your joystick does. For Macintosh users, this is a standard Input Sprockets interface. For Windows users, be sure to set all unused axis to NONE! See the General Controls section of this manual for a more thorough description of joystick setup. Set Equipment Options This is where you decide what each button on your joystick does, and choose any special hardware you have, such as radio stacks, etc. Test Joystick and Equipment This is where you can see how your joystick is responding, as well as see if any special hardware selected above is responding. You can also set the joystick damping here. For technically-realistic flying, all the damping should be completely turned off, and the joystick sensitivity cranked to full. Simulators are harder to fly than real airplanes, though, so you may want to add some artificial damping and lower the joystick sensitivity to make the airplane feel more realistic. Time of Day Use this to set the time of day for your flights. Dawn (06:00) and Dusk (17:00) are cool-looking. Evening (19:00) with an overcast cloud layer is recommended for instrument flight (IFR) training. Time will advance in real-time. Set Weather (Space, Atmosphere, and Water) Note that you have slider control over the meteorological situation at various altitudes. These triple-sliders outline the limits you set for the weather at various altitudes. The "rate of change" slider controls how fast the weather is changing. The computer's internal weather generator will keep the weather changing until your limits are reached! You can also fly in actual real-time weather downloaded from the internet! Check out www.X-Plane.com for the current location of the current file. Conditions for atmosphere, water, and space may also be set. Don't slide on a wet runway, crash a floatplane on a Tsunami, or get distracted by a meteors! (Unless you want to, of course.) Weights and Fuel Use the sliders to set the weights and fuel you want to fly. Watch the maximum take-off weight! If you fly over this weight you are asking for trouble! Realistic, Instrument and Equipment Reliability =>Engine failures will cause immediate lack of power. =>Oil pressure failures will cause the engine to slowly lose power and then seize =>Vacuum system failures are realistic, complete with gyro tumble as the gyros spin down. =>Instrument failures will cause the instruments to stay in the position they were in when the failure occurred. =>Control failures will cause the controls to snap to the center position and stay there, simulating cable failure. Sound Sounds are set here. ATC verbal communications are possible if the appropriate speech drivers are installed. The window explains in more detail. Warnings This sets how "strict" the sim is. All boxes should be checked "on" for maximum realism. Check them "off" if you want to do free-flight without worrying about aircraft limitations. Quick-Flight Setup Quickly set your aircraft, location, time, and even a little weather here.



The Output Menu Graphic Flight Record This is where the graphic data selected from the "Data Output" in the "Settings" menu can be observed. Point the mouse at whatever part of the curve you are interested in (no need to click) and the numerical value of that data appears underneath the labels at the left side of the screen. Clicking on the "starting time" controls at the bottom of the screen controls how many seconds since data selection was made you wish to start viewing. Low Enroute, Sectional Chart, Weather Radar Map, Textured Map, and 3-D Map These plot the local area with your flight path plotted in red and black. The weather radar map shows fine details if you have thunderstorms selected in the "Set Weather" window. You may position your aircraft in various maps by setting altitude, speed and direction, then clicking in the map. The 3-D Map requires a pretty fast machine to run smoothly, but is a nice site to see if you have the hardware for it. Approach Plates for the Local Airports Menu Plots the approach plate of the selected airport. This chart is used for setting VOR, ILS, and ADF frequencies as well as planning ILS approaches. Notice the elevation of your airport! Fly an instrument approach and then open these windows to see how your approach looked.				The View Menu Many view options are available for watching your flight. The letters in brackets are keyboard equivalents. Just hit those keys to get the views. Enter/Leave Flight Replay Mode offers a video replay of your flight. In the glareshield some VCR-like buttons appear, which can be pressed to wind up or down, start or stop the replay, or study interesting situations (like crashes). If your monitor or videocard has video-out you can output the movie to a VCR. You can change the view of the replay with the usual keys from the "View" menu. The Special Menu Output one flight engine cycle This saves an extended text file to your hard disk with all current simulator data. You can read this file with any word processor. This option is useful for people with an aeronautical engineering background, or the extremely curious. Use this data to check the simulator output, or observe loads or other data pertaining to the aircraft at the moment that you clicked on this menu item. Instructions These are brief but self-explanatory. X-Plane uses help-screens when you leave the mouse-pointer over an unclear subject for a few seconds. Show Mouse-Click Regions This plots annoying little yellow rectangles where you can click with the mouse... it might be useful for designing custom cockpits, etc.