You heard me correctly. X-Plane is on the iPhone!

So I was breezing through the iTunes App Store yesterday morning, and I think I may have found the app that gets me fired for not doing anything that I am supposed to be doing. X-Plane, yes THAT X-Plane, is on the iPhone now.

For those of you that don’t know what X-Plane is, here’s a little background. In civil aviation flight simulators, there are basically two games in town: Microsoft and Austin Meyer’s X-Plane. They’re both excellent sims and scratch two different itches.

I tend to prefer Microsoft’s Flight Sim for several reasons, none of which are true slamdunks. Essentially, I know MSFS (Microsoft Flight Simulator) better, the technology seems to be a little further ahead (true 3D cockpits, for instance), and the scenery is more accurate (great for sightseeing).

X-Plane, on the other hand, is more for tinkerers and engineers. It actually lets you design a plane, from scratch, and then the program figures out how (or if) that plane would fly, based on physics. So you can design pretty much any kind of plane you want and then go fly it. It’s the aeronautical engineer’s dream! It should be mentioned that Austin Meyer used X-Plane to figure out what a Mars plane might look like. He basically plugged in the stats for Mars — gravity, air pressure, etc. — and then set about trying different models to see what would work. It’s fascinating stuff, and yes, you can fly the Mars plane in the sim.

But back to the notion at hand. A stripped-down version of X-Plane, with four flyable aircraft, is available for $10 on the iTunes App Store. I love it. The graphics aren’t first rate, but they’re beyond next-gen for mobile handsets. There seems to be only one airport, which is just a strip, surrounded by very-mountainous terrain and a few lakes. There also isn’t a lot of realism as far as VORs, maps, GPS, etc. But you have gear (for the planes with retractable undercarriage) control, flap control, throttle control, and the yoke is the accelerometer (which takes a little getting used to, but works well).

All in all, if you’re a flight sim enthusiast as I am, I highly recommend this app to sate your need for mobile flight-simming.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 8:51 am and is filed under iPhone Apps.