
NASA’s Space Shuttle can be started at very high altitude and flown in glide mode to a landing at Cape Kennedy or Edwards AFB, and the Canadair CL-415 amphibious seaplane can operate on land or water.
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More than 50 airplanes come with the simulator software, and they’re grouped according to class, such as “General Aviation,” “Heavy Metal” and “Fighters.” The most popular plane is probably the Cessna 172, but other aircraft range from Cirrus’ “the-jet” (Meyer is on the growing list of those who have ordered the real thing) to the X-15 rocket ship that can be dropped from a NASA B-52. You use the “X-Plane” program to fly, “Plane-Maker” allows users to easily make or modify planes, “Airfoil-Maker” is used to create or change lift and drag coefficients for wings and tails, and “Briefer” lets users plan the simulated flight. X-Plane 9.0 comes on six DVDs, the first of which contains several programs and the airplane fleet.

On the simulator, the gauge is still completely visible-it just isn’t working! This is much more like an actual failure. When an instrument fails on the computer, it’s much more deceptive than when your instructor places a card over the device in a real plane.

X-Plane allows almost any part or system of the plane to fail at specified or random times, speeds or altitudes. My office is about halfway between the two airports, so I went outside and looked south-there was a large black cloud, and rain was falling on this desert country.Įmergencies are, perhaps, better and more safely simulated on the computer than they are in the air with an instructor. I had forgotten that I had turned on the real-weather function.

Halfway there, I was surprised by the raindrops depicted on my computer screen. Once, I was sitting in my darkened office simulating a short flight from KLAS (McCarran International Airport, also in Las Vegas) to KHND.
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There’s also an option to download real weather from the Internet and automatically update your computer data to match conditions at the weather station nearest your plane’s current location. These forces are summed up, and physics is used to complete the flight modeling. The model plane is divided into hundreds of small areas aerodynamic forces on each of these are calculated many times per second. X-Plane‘s scenery includes more than 18,000 airports, as well as aircraft carriers, helipads on rooftops and oil rigs, and even NASA-generated terrain on Mars. This one shows the avionics panel as well as the exterior of “the-jet” by Cirrus, which is in a roll.
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Avionics vendors also use X-Plane: Garmin has a flight-training device built around a three-screen G1000 panel connected to a PC running the program. No other home simulator has that distinction. Each subsequent version offers vastly increased capability, and because of the extremely flexible and accurate way the planes are treated, X-Plane has been approved by the FAA to drive several commercial simulators that can be used to log time toward a license. Twelve years ago, I bought X-Plane 1.0, the work of one pilot, aeronautical engineer and programmer, Austin Meyer. True, simulators can be fun to play with, but X-Plane is much more than a game.

You may view a home flight simulator as akin to a game.
