![]() The prototype with vertical lift motors has achieved vertical flight, and is being prepared to make the horizontal flight transition. The piloted Alia-250 is still in development however, one prototype without the vertical-lift motors has successfully flown in a "conventional" fixed-wing configuration from Burlington, Vermont, to Bentonville, Arkansas, with multiple stops to charge the batteries. Clark enlisted X-Plane's help testing Beta Technologies' eVTOL designs and eventually the Alia eVTOL came to be. If you have your own idea for what would be an incredible airplane, you can put that in X-Plane and then fly it in the simulator and see how the real airplane will fly."įive years ago, Kyle Clark, founder and CEO of Beta Technologies, approached Meyer with the idea to build an aircraft that doesn't require fuel or a runway. The difference is X-Plane is pretty realistic in how the aircraft performance is modeled, and that includes airplanes that have never flown before. "So, you can fly X-Plane in real-time, just like you would fly any other flight simulator. However, as the flight model is refined, the simulator can better resemble real-world performance, and aircraft quirks and design flaws."You can input the design of any aircraft and then the simulator will predict how that airplane will fly," Austin Meyer, founder of Laminar Research, told AOPA. Famous real-world aircraft modeled in X-Plane include the V-22 Osprey, the Harrier Jump Jet, the NASA Space Shuttle, and Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne.īlade element theory has shortcomings, as it can sometimes be difficult to design an aircraft that performs precisely as would real-world aircraft. X-Plane can model fairly complex aircraft designs, including helicopters, rockets, rotor craft and tilt-rotor craft. This approach allows users to design aircraft on their computer quickly and easily, as the simulator engine will show immediately how an aircraft with a given design might perform in the real world. When this process is applied to each component, the simulated aircraft will fly virtually like its real counterpart does. With Blade-element theory, a wing, for example, may be made up of many sections (1 to 4 is typical), and each section is further divided into as many as 10 separate sections, then the lift and drag of each section is calculated, and the resulting effect is applied to the whole aircraft. Blade-element theory and other computational aerodynamic models can be used to compute aerodynamic forces in real time or to pre-compute aerodynamic forces of a new design for later use in a traditional lookup table type of simulator. It is a way of modeling the forces and moments on an aircraft by individually evaluating the parts that constitute it. These simulators do a good job of simulating the flight characteristics of the aircraft they were designed to simulate (those with known aerodynamic data), but are not useful in design work, and do not predict the performance of aircraft when the actual figures are not available.īlade-element theory is one method of improving on this. Traditionally, flight simulators try to emulate the real-world performance of an aircraft by using lookup tables to find known aerodynamic forces such as lift or drag, which vary with flight condition. ![]() X-Plane differentiates itself by implementing an aerodynamic model known as blade element theory. Switching the planet to Mars is an option that comes with the game, and although the air is thin, flight is possible. It allows flight from -70 degrees south to 74 degrees north. It comes with five scenery disks, and one with scenery and the actual simulator. X-Plane also has a plugin architecture that allows users to create their own modules and aircraft, extending the functionality of the software by letting users create their own worlds or replicas of places on earth. X-Plane is packaged with other software to build and customize aircraft and scenery, offering a complete flight simulation environment. X-Plane is a flight simulator for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows by Laminar Research. ![]()
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