This approach allows users to design aircraft quickly and easily, as the simulator engine immediately illustrates how an aircraft with a given design might perform in the real world. When this process is applied to each component, the simulated aircraft will fly similar to its real-life counterpart. After that, the lift and drag of each section are calculated, and the resulting effect is applied to the whole aircraft. wing) may be made up of many sections (1 to 4 is typical), and each section is further divided into as many as 10 separate subsections. With blade element theory, a surface (e.g. Blade-element theory and other computational aerodynamic models are often used to compute aerodynamic forces in real time or pre-compute aerodynamic forces of a new design for use in a simulator employing lookup tables. These simulators sufficiently simulate the flight characteristics of the aircraft, specifically those with known aerodynamic data, but are not useful in design work, and do not predict the performance of aircraft when the actual figures are not available.īlade element theory improves on this type of simulation by modelling the forces and moments on an aircraft and individually evaluating the parts that constitute it. Traditionally, flight simulators emulate the real-world performance of an aircraft by using empirical data in predefined lookup tables to determine aerodynamic forces such as lift or drag, which vary with differing flight conditions. X-Plane differentiates itself from other simulators by implementing an aerodynamic model called blade element theory. Screenshot of X-Plane 11.25: Beechcraft King Air C90 at Appleton International Airport out of the box New aircraft such as the Airbus A330 and F-14 will also be featured. It is set to feature a new weather engine featuring volumetric clouds and windscreen rain effects out of the box. On September 25, 2021, X-Plane 12 was announced at Flight Sim Expo 2021. Although initially available for free, only five initial locations are available without purchase of a monthly subscription.
XPLANE 11 UPDATE
On December 9, 2019, X-Plane Mobile Global, a major update for the mobile port, was released. Update 11.50 in September 2020 introduced Vulkan and Metal support. The official release of X-Plane 11 was on March 30, 2017. A second public beta was released on December 6, 2016, which fixed some major bugs. On November 25, 2016, Laminar Research released the public beta of the simulator's latest version, X-Plane 11, to the general public. This is further enhanced by the X-Plane forums, where users can share aircraft, scenery, plugins, and the Scenery Gateway website, which allows users to share airports with other users, which can be eventually integrated into the base product.
XPLANE 11 SOFTWARE
X-Plane also has a plugin architecture that allows users to create their own modules, extending the functionality of the software by letting users create their own worlds or replicas of places on Earth. X-Plane is pre-packaged with several commercial and military aircraft, as well as global scenery, which covers most of the Earth. A mobile version is available for Android, iOS, and webOS since 2009 as well.
XPLANE 11 PROFESSIONAL
Commercial desktop versions are sold for macOS, Windows, and Linux, although Laminar Research also distributes FAA-certified versions for professional use.
XPLANE 11 SERIES
X-Plane is a flight simulation engine series developed and published by Laminar Research since 1995.