AVSIM Commercial Flight Simulator Review Laminar Research's X-Plane Version 6.40

X-Plane is the work of Austin Meyer. Laminar Research does not have a large staff as does the Microsoft Flight Simulator. That was enough to intrigue me. Of all the general aviation flight simulators only these two are still in production. It is a David versus Goliath. X-Plane started out by creating a niche among the Macintosh community by providing a very detailed and accurate model of aircraft design and simulation. X-Plane actually started out as a simulation of the Piper Archer. It continues to evolve and is currently in version 6.40 with 6.50 due out next month.

X-Plane uses "element theory". Austin defines this as "breaking the aircraft down into many small elements and then finding the forces on each little element many times per second. These forces are then converted into accelerations which are then integrated to velocities and positions". This approach creates a very realistic model that is based on the geometry of the plane, not a file with numbers you plugged in to tell the program how the plane should react.

X-Plane's flight model is so accurate that it has been given approval by the FAA to be used for ATP certificate training. It is also used by Piper Aircraft Company for virtual test flights for the Arrow. Carter Copter is using X-Plane to produce a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft capable of cruising at 350 mph, and Wingco's Atlantica BWB prototype flying wing uses X-Plane for design testing.

The program is actually several programs. You get Airfoil-Maker, Plane-Maker, World-Maker, X-Plane, and Briefer. All of these are included in the base product that sells for $59.99. For additional $20 you get X-Plane plus the enhanced world scenery package. The full product also includes accurate terrain modeling for Mars (Yes I said MARS!).

Not only does X-Plane accurately denote terrain on the earth, it does the same for Mars. This is based on NASA data collected by a satellite in Mars orbit. This brings about the next question. Why Mars? The terrain, gravity, and atmosphere are accurate. Try landing at ten times the normal landing speed of a plane on the earth. Mars' atmosphere is a tenth as thick. With the additional Mars scenery package you can go site seeing on the entire planet with huge craters and mountains that seem to rise forever. Flying on Mars is tricky to say the least.Landing well that is an art all into itself. Approaching the runway and ten times normal landing speed makes for very little room for error. I spent many hours getting this down.

Airfoil-Maker is used to create the cross section of various wings. X-Plane comes standard with about 30 airfoils and many more are available for download from sites such as X-Plane.Org. [Editor's Note: AVSIM Online's Library Manager and Reviewer Mark Roberts, and Senior Library Manager Rick Rossner maintain this AVSIM Partner site.] So unless you are an aircraft designer looking to push the envelope with new designs, you most likely will not use this much. It's a bit complicated and not very user friendly.

Plane-Maker is a cool program that you can produce, modify and pretty much make up anything and see if you can make it fly. This pictures shows the wire model for the included Airbus A310. Making fine changes to the body is as simple and pointing a mouse clicking and dragging. There is many options to check your design before flying it. 3D to see how all the parts move, day and night textures options to check your paint job. Panels are also designed in Plane-Maker. X-Plane panels leave a lot to be desired. They are basic at best although there have been some nice ones released by freeware authors.

World-Maker is the included program used to design scenery. Scenery is got to be one of the biggest drawbacks of X-Plane. The world is very simple with few if any cities and most airports are nothing more and a few scant taxiways and runways. There are add-on sceneries available, but not many.

I decided to see what I could do in World-Maker at a local airport I'm very familiar with. I opened the program, selected airports to edit, and then scrolled down to Barstow-Daggett (KDAG). It took very little time to learn the interface and begin adding taxiways, ramps, and a helipad. If you have a chart for a particular airport the process isn't that bad. From the same program you can select Objects to add buildings to the airport, but they are very basic and not that good to look at. The program does allow custom objects and a few are available.

The last included program is called Briefer. Briefer produces data in a text format for the weather is at your departure, enroute, and arrival airports. This is based on the metar.rwx file located in your X-Plane directory. X-Plane does not currently download this automatically; instead you either have to download it yourself or you can use a great utility called X-Plane Weather Autoload. It's free for download. You can also start X-Plane and generate weather randomly. The sky and clouds are great. Thunder storms bring pouring rain and lightening.

This gets us to the main program, X-Plane. Austin has spent most of his effort on creating aircraft flight models that are very accurate. The scenery, aircraft, and cockpits that come default will not make you drool all over the keyboard. In fact, at first glance this simulator looks very bland. The cockpits are generic, scenery is sparse at best, and the aircraft leave a lot to be desired. There are many aircraft available for download from small single engines up to fighter planes and commercial jets.

X-Plane comes with about 18,000 airports around the world, most of the navigational beacons, and about 40 default planes. The aircraft range from the Bell 206B Jet Ranger to the X-30. VTOL (vertical take off and landing) V-22 is also present along with many general and commercial aviation aircraft.

I used a flight from O'Hare International to Dallas Fort Worth International in the America West A319 for this review. This plane has one of the best panels with side views and a pretty good paint scheme. It handles well and is a joy to fly. I had no difficulty with the GPS although it is very basic in design. The flight was made at FL350 with real weather loaded.

The flight went great. I got my weather, fired up the Airbus and headed up to FL350. Enroute I saw a lot of traffic around me. The AI traffic is plentiful and a couple actually set off my TCAS. As I approached Dallas I transitioned onto the approach at Ft Smith on the Bonham Three Arrival. All the fixes, NDBs, and VORs were as published. About 30 miles from the airport I requested the DFW ATIS and was giving it in text and voice format. Windows XP comes standard with this feature. If you have an older operating system, you will have to download it from Microsoft. I was given local weather, altimeter, and runway in use. Three Five Left was the active. Requesting ILS 35L is done by hitting the enter key, scrolling down to request ILS, then down to 35L DFW. I was given vectors south of the airport, descent to 2,000 feet and easy turns back to intercept the ILS about 10 miles south of the airport. From the picture you can see Dallas Fort Worth International and my biggest dislike. There is nothing at DFW. The taxiways and runways are pretty well placed—but there's no building.

Test System Dell Dimension 8100 1.7 GHz Windows XP Home 512 Megs RAM GeForce 4 64Mb DDR 18X DVD CD ROM SB Live! X Gamer Sound Sidewinder Precision 2 Joystick Dell 19" Monitor Flying Time: 400+ hours over 1.5 years

Austin managed to find some time in his busy schedule to answer a few questions for me recently. One of the questions I ask was a brief history of X-Plane. This is what Austin had to say:

"Back in 1988 or so, after I had gotten my instrument rating in the calm and friendly skies of Columbia, SC, I found myself in San Diego, CA, working for duPont Aerospace. That summer in 1988 or so in San Diego I took an instrument currency flight to keep my IFR skills up and had a hell of a time getting up to speed in the crowded, fast-paced, hectic ATC system of San Diego after the relative slow and laid-back ATC operations in my home state of South Carolina. After finally getting my IFR skills up to speed after about 3 or 4 flights, I decided that I wanted a instrument trainer to keep my IFR skills up on the personal computer. Microsoft Flight Sim was running on the little baby Macintoshes back then, but there were a few things I wanted done differently and I know MS would not change the sim just for me... so I started a flight sim called, at the time, "Archer-II IFR". I used it to keep up my instrument currency.

A Bachelors degree of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University followed and during my engineering studies there I expanded "Archer-II IFR" to be able to simulate most any airplane imaginable by simply plugging in the blueprints for that airplane, and letting the sim then figure out how the plane should fly based on those blueprints. I used the sim to test out various aircraft designs I had conceived (result: Cessna, Piper, Lancair and Mooney do just fine without me... My designs were too difficult to fly safely.) and I renamed the sim to "X-Plane", in honor of the series of aircraft tested at Edwards in the '60s and continuing through today. (As of this writing, the X-32 and X-35 are duking it out in the flight test to be the next Joint Strike Fighter... the X-Plane tradition continues..).

Today, X-Plane is still written and developed on the Macintosh (as it has since day one) and ported to the Windows machine to allow cross-platform sales and distribution. Engineers at Velocity, NASA, and now Carter-Copter use X-Plane to do design evaluation and simulated flight test. Eight-year olds try their own designs in X-Plane and a countless youngsters gleefully crash their simulated F-22s into the ground at Mach-2. Most X-Plane customers are pilots, or people who want a sim that has a level of realism that is appropriate for pilots. Some airline pilots take X-Plane with them on their (real) overseas flights on their laptop computers and simulate the flight back to America while on their layover at hotels in Europe. Many airline and freight pilots keep their currency up on X-Plane to breeze through their bi-annual flight-currency checks. Countless private pilots use X-Plane to help keep up their currency when time and money constraints keep them from making it out to the airport as often as they would like. I have gotten a handful of orders from the D.O.D., the C.I.A. and Microsoft. But the majority of the X-Plane customers, I think, are simply people who want to experience the joy of flight, and their personal computer with a copy of X-Plane is an awfully fun, easy, (and safe!) way to do it.

Many pilots have regular access to old Cessnas, but what would it be like to get dropped from the wing of a B-52 in an X-15 and head to the fringes of space at 4,000 mph? Or to fly a full re-entry in the Space Shuttle? Or take the SR-71 to 70,000 feet and Mach-3? Or fly a rocket plane on Mars? X-Plane will tell you."