X-PLANE V8 (Mac)

Other products by Graphic Simulations

Product Features

• Comprehensive and powerful flight simulator
• 29 aircraft spanning the aviation industry and history
• Scenery spans the globe; easily customize your own airplanes
• Variable weather; fly actual current conditions with Internet downloads
• 35 systems can be failed manually or randomly

Product Details

• Our recommended age: 5 - 20 years
• Manufacturer recommended age: 0 months and up
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0006I7GLW
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: November 30, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #19,289 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)

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  Video Games > Mac Games > Simulation

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer
X-Plane is the most comprehensive and powerful flight simulator available for the personal computer. X-Plane simulates anything that fli es: single-engine fixed wing props to multi-engine jets; gliders to dirigibles; helicopters to spacecraft to VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.

X-Plane has the most realistic flight model available for personal compu ters. It comes with subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, simulating aircraf t from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the sup ersonic SR-71.

X-Plane comes with 29 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and histo ry), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the Internet.

X-Plane scenery spans the globe. You can land at any of thousands of air ports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building t ops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs. Weather is variab le from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind , wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts. Rain, snow, and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders ! X-Plane can download real weather data from the Internet, allowing you to fly in actual current conditions!

X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with 35 systems that can be failed manually, or randomly when you least expect it! You can fail instruments , engines, flight controls, and landing gear at any moment.

X-Plane includes Plane-Maker, which allows you to create your own airpla nes, and World-Maker, which lets you create your own scenery. Also included is Weather Briefer, which produces a weather briefing based on actual weather cond itions downloaded from the net.

X-Plane is extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create texture s, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design.

Product Description
X-Plane 8.0 is the ultimate in general aviation simulators. With a wide range of airplanes, all-new helicopters, dynamic speech synthesis and full-planet terrain-mapped scenery will keep your eyes popping out for hours!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review for the Military Members Apple User Group, December 14, 2005

By	Gerrit H. Dalman "Forged in Fire!" (Oklahoma) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There has been a noticeable lack of flight simulators in the Mac software market for a long time. Amid the faltering competition, one developer has stood by the platform through thick and thin - Austin Meyer's Laminar Research and their acclaimed sim, X-Plane.

X-Plane is every bit a simulator but not much of a game. Aviation professionals should be excited by the fact that aerodynamic performance is accurately simulated using a complex physics engine. Believe it or not, most sims cheat by depending on pre-defined data that is used to estimate aircraft behavior in different configurations. It is such an accurate simulation that you can even fly on Mars or guide the Shuttle Orbiter from orbit to landing!

Superior accuracy is teamed with above-par graphics too. With satellite derived terrain, detailed aircraft models, realistic clouds, and high-resolutions, X-Plane holds it's own visually against most Windows flight sims. Though turning the settings all the way up can challenge even a G5, the graphics are scalable to support even old and low-end machines. This leaves load times the only real frustration.

With its technical emphasis, X-Plane can be very useful to aircrew as well as certified or aspiring private pilots. The program keeps a logbook of all flights, offers true to life system failures, air traffic control, airfields, charts, instrument panels, and aircraft checklists to practice with. Approaches and takeoffs can be practiced repeatedly with easy menu commands and there's a "get me lost" feature for challenging navigation skills. Two computers can even be networked in an instructor mode for training purposes.

While X-Plane isn't a combat sim and doesn't provide a real gaming experience, hobbyists and aviation enthusiasts can still enjoy experimenting with the wide variety of included aircraft - including airships, helicopters, gliders, and more. There's even an active community that uses the included content creation tools to churn out an ever-wider variety of downloadable aircraft (both real and fictional), flight plans, and scenery. Add to that a variety of challenging scenarios like water bombing, tanker rendezvous, and carrier landing, and X-Planes appeal grows.

Thanks to the author's secret weapon (http://x-plane.com/weapon.html) X-Plane is in a perpetual state of rapid development. That means regular bug fixes and feature additions. Not that it needs more! It can even playback real blackbox recordings, has both ambient ATC recordings and real-time ATC interaction thanks to OS Xs built-in speech software.

One of X-Planes coolest extras is the ability to capture the screen to a QuickTime movie. Though there is no indication that you are recording and no sound will be saved, there was little affect on the sims performance with default settings on an iMac G5.

Simple menus are always available and offer a lot of flexibility, but since development is simultaneously cross-platform, command-key shortcuts don't exist and the interface makes use of non-standard elements that may take some getting used to. Fortunately the menus and dialogs are fairly intuitive and require few trips to the minimalist printed manual or the more thorough version on disc.

X-Plane is a valuable tool for professional aviators and engineers yet it is affordable and accessible enough to appeal to anyone with an interest in aviation. Besides, it's the only civil aviation sim for sale on the Mac since Microsoft, Flight Unlimited, and Fly! faded away with Mac OS 9.

All aircrew should have a copy and visit XPlaneFreeWare.net (http://www.xplanefreeware.net/~barry/) to download relevant airframes and anyone involved in air operations should at least give the demo a try. X-Plane isn't priced like engineering software or marketed like a just-for-fun flight sim, but it succeeds as both!

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too Complicated -- When you just want a simple flight sim..., May 20, 2006

By	C. Tibbs "Onebrick short..." (Blue Ridge Mountains of VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars 

Conclusion!!!! There is no good flight sim for Mac --IF YOU JUST WANT TO FLY A PLANE ON YOUR COMPUTER. X-Plane is a great software if by next year you hope to be earning your living flying. This is a very complicated program and there is no way to just fly and enjoy. I have a G5 dual core Mac with the large 20" display -- and you can only use a protion of the screen to get the right display to see the entire cockpit etc.
The developers are great people and will assist you in anyway -- but you will spend more time gathering information and "fixing" things than flying. ABSOLUTELY GREAT SOFTWARE FOR A PERSON WANTING TO REALLY LEARN TO FLY -- but I want to sit at my computer and just have a simple take off and landing experience. Thinking of buying a PC again just to get back to Microsoft Flight Sim. -- And Fly II? I bought it twice over the years and didn't take me long to throw them in the trash.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not really a "game"..., October 14, 2007

By	Canon User (Naples, FL, USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

... it's a flight simulator, plain and simple. I've always dreamed of obtaining a Private Pilot Certificate, but one thing has always kept me from achieving this goal. You guessed it, CASH! The one thing that steadily increases the amount you have to pay for flight lessons is the need to keep doing things over and over until your instructor is satisfied that you can perform any given procedure satisfactorly. X-Plane allows you to practice these procedures in the comfort of your own home until you have them down cold.

I've read the other reviews and I'm convinced they are dealing with an X-Plane evil twin or something. I've had no such problems with my modest computer setup. Here's the breakdown; I run X-Plane 8.6 (it is now Universal Binary) on a MacBook Pro that comes with the standard ATI Radeon 1600 256 MB graphics card. 100 MB hard drive and 2GB DDR2 SDRAM. OS is X version 10.4.10. I run X-Plane off and external fire wire 800 1 TB 7200 RPM drive. Finally my controls are the CH Products USB Flight Sim Yoke and Rudder Pedals. Everything is calibrated for maximum realism. Of course, all my rendering settings aren't maxed out, everything is pretty much middle of the road (the X-Plane webite has very detailed instructions on how to get the best performance out of you machine.

When I fly the simulator I average between 50 and 60 frames per second - smooth, smooth, smooth.

I haven't had one single glitch or system crash.

All the procedures I practice are straight out of Sporty's Private Pilot Course (about 200 bucks). The actions of X-Plane emulate the procedures described in the course to a T.

Now think about it, how much further you'll be ahead of the game if you practice the maneuvers, learn the instrumentation and handle your X-Plane aircraft with a high degree of proficiency when you first walk into your local civilian airport and sign-up for your Private Pilot Certification course as opposed to the person that walks in the door cold and requests flying lessons? I'm sure your training will take much less time than that of the complete novice. And as you know, time is money. With X-Plane under your belt, it's like you've done all your homework before even stepping into a class.

If you really want a super trainer to fly, just Google Jason Chandler. He has created some of the most beatiful and accurate planes for X-Plane on a payware basis. I purchased his Cessna 172S SP for about $10 and absolutely love it. It's far better than the Cessna 172 that comes preloaded in X-Plane.

As for instructions on using the various pieces of equipment in X-Plane, do a little searching on the web in terms of actual equipment used on the planes, checlists, airpot directories etc... With a little bit of common sense diligence, you'll find everything you need.

Someday (in the not too distant future I hope), I will sign up for those flight lessons and will be thorougly prepared to pass the course requirments thanks in large part to X-Plane!

P.S. Over the years I've tried Microsoft Flight simulator and Fly! on a PC. They are over-hyped and just plan suck!

But if your running X-Plane 8.6 on a new Intell DuoCore Mac, you are in for treat. This is the best consumer-grade flight simlator on the planet. Period.

Many thanks to Austin Meyer and his team for their phenominal work!