X-Plane 9

X-Plane's flight model can even handle flying wings and fly-by-wire systems, as needed for a B-2 simulation.

The X-Plane scenery package covers the Earth in stunning resolution from 74 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitude. Scenery is also available for Mars thanks to the Mars Orbiting Laser Altimeter, which mapped that planet's elevation. On Earth, users can land at any of over 33,000 airports or test their mettle on aircraft carriers, oil rigs, frigates (which pitch and roll with the waves), or helipads atop buildings. They can also realistically model the flight of remote controlled model aircraft, air-launch in an X-15 or Space Ship One from the mother ship, fly re-entries into Earth's atmosphere in the Space Shuttle, fly with friends over the Internet or a LAN, drop water on forest fires, or shoot approaches to aircraft carriers at night in stormy weather and rough water conditions in a damaged F-4. The situations that can be simulated are incredible!

Weather is variable in X-Plane from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and micro bursts. Rain, snow, and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders. Actual weather conditions can be downloaded from the Internet, allowing users to fly in the weather that currently exists at the location of the flight!

X-Plane also has detailed failure modeling, with multitudes of systems that can either be failed manually at an instructor's command, or randomly when users least expect it! Users can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, control cables, antennae, landing gear, or any of dozens of other systems at any moment.

While on its own X-Plane represents the world's most comprehensive flight simulator, the installation DVD also comes with Plane-Maker (allowing users to create custom aircraft or modify existing designs), Airfoil-Maker (allowing users to create airfoil performance profiles), and Weather-Briefer (to give users a weather briefing before the flight when using real weather conditions downloaded from the Internet).

X-Plane is extremely customizable, allowing users to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for their own airplane designs or for the planes included with the sim.

X-Plane's accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage), versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions), add-on programs (in aircraft and scenery editors), customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery make it the ultimate flight simulation experience for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms.

Version 9 improves upon version 8 with numberous performance enhancements (including a new feature to utilize multiple CPU cores to virtually eliminate the pause when loading new scenery), new aircraft (including the in-house models created by Cirrus and Van's Aircraft for the Cirrus Jet and Van's RVs, respecively), improved high-definition global scenery, and flight model refinements, among other things.