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 PC. 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
PC in their bedroom - their training is done in a $150,000 simulator - but
what they see is exactly what you get on your PC. What's more, you're not
limited to Earth – in X-Plane you can even fly around Mars! Firstly, be
warned. X-Plane 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 dialogue 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
X-Plane 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. X-Plane 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. X-Plane's 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
license, it's the best program out there and will have you absorbed for
hours.*Download *X-Plane 10.0* in Softonic
