The winter weather is definitively upon us. We have this very thick fog everyday, a high humidity level, low temperature and bad visibility. Most of the planes are grounded, no flights, no fun…borring. Well, in some sense, that’s good because I have a lot of work to do, proposals to write, refine, perfect and articles to finish and very little time for anything else.

How can I treat myself with this rush of adrenaline I get when I am on short final for a tricky crosswind landing and wondering if I should throttle up to max power and abort the landing ?  X-plane 9 an ultra realistic flight simulator (sic) is here to help.

I purchased it few weeks ago when I was wandering at the Apple store at Arden Fair Mall. Before starting flying real planes I was ok with simulators like “Microsoft Flight simulator”, it was fun. But now I don’t like it anymore because it feels and reacts weird/not right. I might be picky on that one. However, I have to say that I’m having a blast with X-Plane 9. It is fairly realistic and I have pretty much the same feeling flying the real C172. It is just few settings/adjustments away from being almost perfect on how the plane reacts. The program relies on the blade element theory, which uses fine descriptions of specific airfoils to do real time computations on lift/drag for instance. Other simulators use lookup tables to get the lift and drag for a given flight condition.

There are numerous settings to play with and can also get the real-time weather. X-plane automatically download METAR files and translated them into very realistic weather conditions. The graphics are also really nice and it comes with over 80% of the world terrain on 6 DVD. That’s a hefty 70Gb after installation….The source code of the program seems to be optimized but you still need a good machine with a kick-ass GPU fully loaded with RAM to get most of the awesome graphics. It runs great  and smoothly at a native resolution on my 07′ MacbookPro 2.4Ghz 4Gb/GF 8600M GT 256Mb. It uses around 1.5Gb of RAM and almost all the GPU Ram at the default settings. Sometimes FPS dropped below 20fps in VFR conditions with 25+ miles visibility with lot of terrains, trees and some clouds. Other than that, it runs great.

See Ya ! I’m going back to X-plane. I’m trying to get off the ground with a hefty Cessna 152 in Telluride, CO (9,078 feet above sea level) with 35C outside air temperature … I have this gut feeling it’s not going to be pretty