The most important element in any flight simulator has to be the graphics, and because X-Plane does such an excellent job of modeling the visual aspects of flying there is obviously little need for a soundtrack. That's where you come in. What better way to think up your next musical masterpiece than while flying through an ultra-realistic virtual airspace. And while you're at it actually learn to fly almost any kind of aircraft in existance.

Imagine you're on an approach like the one shown above, where the ground or runway is only partially or intermittently visible through clouds and heavy rain. What are you going to do? Are you are going to use visual references or rely instead on your instruments? Most other flight simulators completely ignore this extremely critical and dangerous part of every approach, the transition from instrument to visual flight, but X-Plane offers each with a remarkably high degree of realism.

The actual process of producing such realism involves number crunching on an epic scale as the dimensions of your aircraft, the wing(s), horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer(s), and propeller(s) (if equipped) are broken down into a finite number of elements. Linear and angular velocities, longitudinal, lateral, and vertical arms of each element are then considered to find velocity and other critical vectors.

During flight, any of about 100 or so variables can be output to the cockpit display for real-time in-flight viewing, a disk output file for post-flight analysis (a simple text file is created), or an internal graphing program as shown here.

You also have access to the same kind of information that a pilot would have, including detailed maps and airport data, and expect to see some stunning scenery as X-Plane produces fractal-generated clouds and terrain rendered from the United States Geological Survey land database. Every peak, mountain and valley in the US is rendered.

As far as choosing which aircraft to fly is concerned X-Plane gives you the choice of either entering the dimensions of the aircraft you want to fly into the Plane Maker and designing your own or choosing one of many ready made designs which include various light aircraft, military and commercial jets (including the new Boeing 777 and Concorde), helicopters and even a prototype of the National Aerospace Plane which uses a jet engine at take off and switches to a rocket engine at high altitude to put it into orbit.

Try doing that with Microsoft Flight Simulator!

Rating - 702,844 (out of a possible 1,000,000)

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