Austin Meyer’s X-Plane franchise has been airborne for almost a decade and a half and, despite ongoing predictions of its imminent demise, the indie flight sim continues to evolve and expand. Now up to version nine, this stubbornly autonomous product plies an ambitious new route with some imaginative aircraft and a whopping 60 gigabytes of global scenery.

Yeah, you read that right. The latest version ships on six DVDs that can collectively add over 60GBs of worldwide terrain to your installation. This scenery is optional (the core install loads up most of North America by default), but if you skip a DVD or three, you’ll wind up with an empty chunk of water where Europe and Africa are supposed to be. I suspect this modular approach is to maximize hard drive space, but even with just a single Canada-Arctic scenery disk added in, X-Plane 9 currently usurps over 23GB of digital real estate on my PC—6GB more than MS FlightSim X with its multiple add-ons and hangars-full of third-party aircraft.

For what it concedes in girth, however, X-Plane makes up for in efficiency. New optimization routines have significantly improved the sim’s already smooth frame-rates, and some updated graphics tweaks (that can take advantage of multi-core processors) all but eliminate those annoying scenery loading pauses you get while crossing geographic boundaries. It all makes for a smooth flight experience, albeit one that still has a long way to go if it wants to give FSX a run for its money in the looks department.



X-Plane’s mountainous topography is consistently attractive (and at 10GB per continent, it damned well better be), but the generic cityscapes and flat, building-less airports effectively kill any sightseeing vibe. You won’t see LAX’s distinctive control tower or even the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco as you pilot through X-Plane’s skies, and that’s a major deal-breaker for many potential fans.

Serious X-Plane veterans clearly don’t throttle their planes skywards just for the eye candy. While some are philosophically opposed to anything with a Microsoft logo (the sim is popular with Mac owners), most enjoy it for the unique “blade element theory” physics that Meyer employs to determine the flight parameters of each aircraft. Some enthusiasts argue that X-Plane’s flight dynamics are superior to the traditional empirical data table method (“feels about right”) employed by Microsoft, but I’ve yet to be convinced.

Whenever I take off in an X-Plane aircraft, I immediately feel like I’m moving through a fluid medium. Small aileron and rudder adjustments cause the plane to pitch and yaw convincingly, but this often leads to an undampened oscillation that can be hard to correct. I’m willing to concede this may be the more realistic approach, but it just doesn’t feel that way alongside Flight Simulator X’s more subdued and controllable flight dynamics (even if they are faked).



X-Plane 9 features more than 30 aircraft—including the sexy new Piaggo P180 Avanti turboprop and Cirrus personal jet—but the sometimes disappointing cockpit and exterior detailing standards compare more to freeware FSX add-ons than a commercial retail simulation. To its credit, X-Plane does boast some wildly different aircraft, from the SR-71 Blackbird to the Hindenburg airship, and some equally unique environments (including the surface of Mars) in which to test-fly them. Astronaut wannabes can even navigate the Space Shuttle Discovery from orbit to touchdown.

It could take months to figure out how everything works (thin documentation and a precipitous learning curve are series trademarks), but if you’re up for the challenge, Graphsim Entertainment just boxed up the latest six-DVD X-Plane 9 collection into a tidy $49.95 package.

July 17, 2008