X-Plane is one of the world's most comprehensive and powerful flight simulators for personal computers. It's not a game, but an engineering tool that can be used to predict the flying qualities of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft with incredible accuracy. X-Plane comes with 19 aircraft in the default installation spanning the aviation industry and its history, and several thousand more are freely downloadable from the internet.
- X-Plane scenery is world-wide, with scenery for the entire planet Earth between 74 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitude and includes over 34,000 airports.
- Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts! Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists at the location of flight!
- X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with multitudes of systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, landing gear, or dozens of other systems at any moment.
- While X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive flight sim, your purchase also comes with Plane-Maker (to create your own airplanes) WorldEditor (WED) an open source 3D scenery and airport editor allowing you to create custom airports or scenery, customize a local airport using built-in airport elements and output scenery or airport data files which can be shared with the X-Plane community.
- X-Plane is also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design or the planes that come with the sim.
- X-Plane's accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage), versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions), add-on programs (in aircraft and scenery editors), customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery makes it the ultimate flight simulation experience for Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.
- Be sure to turn on the beta option in the installer before you run it to get the beta!
- The demo contains a limited scenery area to keep the download size reasonable. It will run for 15 minutes before it begins to ignore the user's input, at which point the simulator must be restarted to fly more.