Trying to find a airport where you know the general location but not necessarily the state or country is hard for me to do in X-plane 11. When I type in the airport's name, (need correct spelling) most of the time it will not show up on the list. Then I have to go outside of X-plane and do a Google/Bing search to find the correct airport code/s.

How difficult would it be to have the current map function in X-plane to expand out to show the world so that you could then zoom back in on a particular area/airport? I would think that all of the current airport location functions (codes, names ,states, etc.  ) have some sort of common relationship  such as Lat/Long coordinates which allows the map to display a given area around the aircraft. 

What do you think? Does this sound like a easer way to locate a unfamiliar airport?

 

Terry 

My understanding of why you can't zoom out from the map (someone correct me if it's wrong), is that the map is based on the currently loaded .dsf scenery tile, and all the associated data. You can't zoom out because it would mean loading too many of these very large tiles into RAM. In other words it's not an abstract map; you're looking at the actual scenery tile where your plane is located. 

What most of us do when we want a world map showing all airports and navaids is use an external flight planner.

I'm currently using the free/donationware LittleNavMap. There is also the free/donationware PlanG flight planner, which I've used before. LittleNavMap is more full-featured but the UI is very cluttered. PlanG is a little easier on the eyes, fewer features. They both work fine, and can be used to generate a .fms flight plan file to load into the GPS or FMS in an X-Plane aircraft. They can also be linked to X-Plane as a moving map display.

In both of these flight planners it's easy to type in the name of an airport or the ICAO code, or you can just scroll and zoom the map all over the world to find it.

Thanks for the info. If you have to run some sort of external program, then I guess you cannot run X-plane in Full Screen? I seem to remember the old Microsoft Flight Sims that let you drag the mouse pointer to a area you might be interested in and if there was a airport there, you could select it.

 

I was hoping X-plane could give me some sort of map without dragging other programs into it. The reason I thought of using lat / long is that most likely airports in X-plane probably have them as part of their data files. Many years ago, I worked on Air Force F-4E and F-111D flight sims. We used lat / long to move the sim to the location the crew needed to start from.  Initially, both sims did not have visual systems. When visuals were finally added, those computers had to talk to the sims main computers to figure out where in the world they were. We are talking about separate room and many cabinets full pf electronics  to generate a simulated flight. Now all we need is a pc, a laptop, or cell phone to sim. Two of those three items were not even invented back then and the pc barely could write a few line of type or stick type figures.

 

I guess that if X-plane had a world map system built in, we would have no need for all of the outside venders trying to sell us their stuff and all of those people would not have jobs.

 

Terry

 

 

52 minutes ago, Cat_Dad said:

I guess that if X-plane had a world map system built in, we would have no need for all of the outside venders trying to sell us their stuff and all of those people would not have jobs.

Neither of the two flight planners/world maps I linked to above are trying to sell you something. They're both free, with optional donations. 

Personally, I'd rather have a choice of outside options like this, instead of relying on what may be a more limited version of the same functionality if it was built into the simulator.