X-Plane

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This article is about a flight simulator. For experimental aircraft, see X-plane.

X-Plane is a flight simulator for personal computers produced by Laminar Research. It runs on Linux, Mac or Windows-based PCs. X-Plane is packaged with other software to build and customize aircraft and scenery, offering a complete flight simulation environment to fly in.

X-Plane distinguishes itself by implementing blade element theory in its flight model, a technique developed to analyze propeller behaviour. It involves breaking an airfoil down into several sub-elements, and then calculating the resultant forces exerted on it as a function of its velocity. The X-Plane flight model applies this method to the entire aircraft, treating fuselage, wings, tail and control surfaces as lift-producing surfaces. The advantage of this method over traditional flight simulators, which use precalculated tables of data, is that, in theory, no performance data ever needs to be gathered from the real aircraft—X-Plane models the performance all by itself, based on the aircraft's geometry, mass, engine position, and power.

Image:X-Plane Evenblade.jpgX-Plane is often used as an aid in designing concept aircraft, such as the Carter Copter. The Registry at X-Plane.org includes hundreds of conceptual and real-world aircraft made with X-Plane by people ranging from aerospace engineers, flight-simulation enthusiasts and aviation hobbyists, as does the downloads section in the X-Plane.org Forums and also in the registry of the X-Plane Freeware Project.

X-Plane is also used in non-motion and full-motion flight simulators for flight training. Indeed, some of these implementations have been certified by the FAA for authorized flight instruction such as Flight Level Aviation and Simtrain.

The current version of the simulator is X-Plane 8.32, which features significant improvements in aircraft design and scenery graphics over past versions of version 8 and version 7.

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