

Iphone x plane simulator#
The simulator presents the pilot with a simple Heads Up Display (HUD) featuring standard compass, altitude, attitude, and speed indicators as well as semi-translucent touchscreen controls for thrust, flap position, brakes, landing gear, and view selectors. Flight yokes are expensive “luxury" peripherals that are often part of hardcore flight simulation fans’ desktop setups–and the iPhone basically “has one built in," in this context. Tilt forward to dive, pull back to climb, and tilt side-to-side to control ailerons. Thanks to its accelerometers, the iPhone basically becomes a flight yoke. The iPhone, as a controller, has them all beat. As a flight simulation fan myself, and a long-time user of X-Plane for the Mac, I have purchased several USB flight sticks over the years to enhance the simulation experience.

Several preset flight scenarios other than the initial runway position are available to choose from, as well as a random flight position feature.Ĭontrol is one of the best features of X-Plane 9 for the iPhone. Other attributes that can be adjusted include: time of day, wind speed and direction, turbulence, cloud type and altitude, visibility, and aircraft weight. Three other aircraft can be chosen through the app’s options menus: the Cessna 172, the Columbia 400, and the Piaggio Avanti. The physics engine, however, remains mostly intact author Austin Meyer points out, the physics in the iPhone version are actually “about 95%" as good as that of the original.Īt startup, X-Plane 9 places the pilot at the top of a runway in Innsbruck, Austria in the default aircraft, the Cirrus Vision, a very light jet. While the number of variables that are modeled by the desktop version boggles the mind, the iPhone version brings forward only those details that are core to a fun, more “relaxed" mobile simulation experience. X-Plane 9 for the iPhone, weighing in at 6.2MB in size, is a significantly scaled down take on the desktop original (which is distributed on six dual-layer DVDs!). Thanks to Laminar’s use this approach, there is an active community of users designing their own aircraft with X-Plane‘s bundled Airfoil-Maker and Plane-Maker applications. This allows for the simulation of aircraft–real or fictional–with no available aerodynamic profile data. Whereas most flight simulators use predefined look-up tables to reproduce the flight characteristics of various aircraft, in X-Plane aircraft are comprised of hundreds of small sections and flight behavior is modeled in real-time by calculating the lift and drag of each of these individual sections. X-Plane sets itself apart from other flight simulators by implementing a concept known as blade element theory.
Iphone x plane for mac os#
X-Plane 9 for the iPhone is based on the desktop version of X-Plane 9, which is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. We’ve recently logged some flight time with this title and are anxious to share our thoughts. As we recently reported, Laminar Research has released a “mini-version" of its hugely popular, realtime physics-based flight simulator X-Plane 9 for the iPhone.
