Have you ever wanted to take charge of a commercial airliner and fly around
the world? Well X-Plane is about as close to the real thing as you're ever
going to get on your Mac. Claiming to be the world's "most comprehensive,
powerful simulator" it's so accurate that the US and Canadian aviation
authorities have given it official approval to train pilots towards their
commercial licence. Of course, those guys are not sat behind a Mac in their
bedroom - their training is done in a $150,000 simulator - but what they see
is exactly what you get on your Mac. What's more, you're not limited to
Earth – you can even fly around Mars! Firstly, be warned. This is one
MASSIVE program. Don't be fooled by the 1.8MB file size in the game
description – that's just the installer. Once you've installed that, a
very swanky download dialog opens to download the other 1.3 gigabytes of the
game. All those scenarios, vectored graphics and flight controls take up a
lot of hardrive space. Depending on your bandwidth, you will be looking at
hours, if not days to download the whole thing. In this demo, you are limited
to just one aircraft and five minutes of flight but in the full version, you
can take control of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well
as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.
It also offers subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, sporting aircraft
from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the
supersonic Concorde and Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie. In all, about 40 aircraft
spanning the aviation industry (and history) with several hundred more which
can be freely downloaded from the internet. There's even a plane builder
option which allows you to build your own model. You can pretty much fly to
any location around the world and choose from over 18,000 airports to test
your landing and take-off skills. You can even test your mettle on aircraft
carriers, helipads, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs.
It naturally features the whole range of weather conditions you might face
and the plane reacts realistically to them. The graphics are vector based so
they're not exactly brilliant but they're what you'd expect from a
simulator . The biggest problem you'll have is working out how on earth to
get started. The controls are incredibly complex to mirror a real commercial
airliner. I spent the best part of 10 minutes just sat on the runway trying
to work out how to start the engines whilst Air Traffic Control went crazy at
me. You are prompted with a few guidelines at how to get rolling (such as
"hit spacebar to release the breaks") although you're not told how to
start the engines. There are so many switches and dials in the cockpit that
there's no knowing what to hit without studying the huge flight manual in
detail. In the end, the best I managed was to race around the airport before
crashing into and destroying a control tower, killing all on board. For those
that do have more patience, they need merely move the mouse cursor to the top
of the screen where a drop down menu will present access to preferences,
instructions, control configuration and many other options. *For those that
just want to fly free as a bird and admire the scenery, X-Plane is not for
you. For those that want the challenge of mastering a real airliner or are
training for a professional licence, it's the best programme out there and
will have you absorbed for hours.*Download *X-Plane 10.0* in Softonic
