Laminar Research X-Plane 8 Part 1 Page 8

By SimHQ on June 16, 2005 in _air4, hide

As I continue to climb I hit the magic “3000” altitude and the right engine catches on fire and starts smoking. Losing two Pratts in the same lifetime would be rare, let alone on the same flight!

Another interesting failure that X-Plane allows for is the total separation of an engine or flight control in flight. Here I’ve set the left engine on the KC-10 to fall off, resulting in an interesting emergency landing.

So we’ve looked at the “business end” of X-Plane. As you can see, it is a useful and effective tool for flight training in many different ways. Flight training is fun, and flying instrument approaches are worthwhile, but what about the casual simulation fan; what does X-Plane offer them? Let’s take a look.

We’ve already touched on the wide variety of aircraft types that are included and available for download. X-Plane 8 is in its infancy right now. A glance at the file archive at X-plane.org shows nearly 700 different aircraft available for Version 7, many of which will be either re-done or imported to meet the differences in Version 8. In fact, I’ve sampled a few of the Version 7 aircraft and have had good luck just plopping them into X-Plane 8 and they appear to work fine. Sometimes you will get an error message and the aircraft won’t load, probably due to a missing texture or object in the package that Version 8 requires. Here is a MiG-15 from Version 7 that seems to work just fine directly imported into Version 8. (MiG-15 by Barry Leger)