X-Plane

THE BAD:
It is a steep learning curve to play this flight simulator. You could find some information on the X-Plane website; you have to go through lots of links. There is no aircrafts specification for their performance, such as take off speed, cruising speed, and landing speed. The download is about 130 MB + therefore if you have a modem like me, it will take about 8 to 10 hours to download. I did it over night while I was asleep.

SUMMARY:
Warning; this is a flight simulator, therefore all the gamers out there who enjoy fast pace action. You will find this game flat boring. However to all the wannabe pilots like me, this is a good opportunity to try a flight simulator without buying it.

I discover X-Plane’s website had free download when I bought my 1st retail X-Plane from publisher XICAT Interactive. After the long download from a modem 56K for the X-Plane file, I did the installation. It extracts a compress file in a small program. It contains great selections of aircrafts, a small portion of Earth and Mars scenery, and several interactive programs. When you start the X-Plane program, it brings you to San Bernardino Intl airport. It will ask to insert the CD or it will run for 5 minutes before it goes Demo mode. This means for 5 minutes you could actually fly the aircrafts with a joystick (or similar control) before it stop. You could use your mouse has a yoke if none is connected. The flight simulator don’t stop, instead you just loss the access of your yoke. X-plane allow you to use the autopilot and trim option to control your bank, and pitch, cockpit control still could be done by clicking on the buttons controls with your mouse for the rest of your flight. The weather pattern could be downloading as METAR file from the web side and copy at the root of X-Plane directory or input your own data from X-Plane menu. The METAR file will give you the real weather for the location, and same time the Briefer program will give you weather outlook for your destination. The Space Shuttle will not be accessible for full entry (Earth’s orbit to Edwards’s airports) because of the limited scenery of the demo, but you could request the Full Approach to give you a feel of flying the Space Shuttle. There is other feature like your X-15 plane to be drop off by B-52 jet. There is seaplane to land on water with nice water effect. The aircraft could get damage as it would be in the real world like rough landing, carburetor icing, exceeding the engine capacity, plus you could request other failures manually.

Now this is what impress me the most of the X-Plane, you have Plane-Maker program with no time limit, so you could build your own aircraft without getting a third party software. However it will be tricky because this flight simulator follow the law of physic on aerodynamic, therefore if your wings are too small or too big, the aircraft will be a dud. There is a tutor (instruction) on the X-Plane’s website how to build an aircraft. I suggest you follow the tutor instruction before you go on your own, unless you are an engineer. The tutor was my answer. When you’re done, you could test fly your design. This was a very steep curve to learn for me, but with lots of time and patience I was able to succeed and I had lots a fun doing it.

There is the other 2 programs, World-Maker and Part-Maker. I believed they are fully functional like the Plane-Maker. I only open the program to view it, but I didn’t try them.

To all the Flight Simulator devotees, I would recommend that you download this free version of X-Plane and try it. Note; I don’t buy anything over the web, however I will be downloading the future X-Plane flight simulator version before I buy it in retail stores.

Happy flying.


Go to www.x-plane.com for your free download

The X-Plane demo version 5.66 and 6.50 was play on;
Pentium II 333MHZ
384 Mb Ram
ATI Rage 128 Pro 32 Mb
Soundblaster 16
Generic joystick, 2 axes, 4 buttons