X-plane

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 in which to fly.

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.

The Tebor Aerospace Evenblade, a fictional aircraft design that exists only in X-Plane

X-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.

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, which features significant improvements in aircraft design and scenery graphics over version 7. 8.40 is also the first version to be a Universal Binary, allowing far higher speeds on Intel Macintoshes.

External links

[Official site]
[AIR.C74.NET] Aircraft & CH controls for X-Plane
[X-Plane Gateway] Comprehensive Links of X-Plane Community
[X-Plane WikiBook]
[X-Plane.org] Community resource to download aircraft, scenery and plugins
[category at ODP]

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.