You heard me correctly. X-Plane is on the iPhone!ADHERER
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.
They just released 9.01 for the iphone this morning, and it reuns even better now! Amazing application, especially for a phone. It’s cool to play X-Plane everywhere now!
100% agreed! I noticed the update last night and installed it. I never really noticed anything wrong with the frame rate in the first version, so 25% better frame rate is off-the-hook awesome!
It would be so cool if they would open it up for downloadable planes and scenery… except it looks like, to keep the frame rate up and disk space down, they didn’t include any buildings or anything. Still, it’s a ton o’ fun.
-Mike
this game is one of the best pc games I have tried so far. It is because of the cool visual effects. But unfortunaly nothing beats CoD MW 2 on playstation 3, so I am returning to the now ^^ In some days my brother will borrow me this game once more, so maybe I will return to my pc then
I haven’t tried this sim yet on my iPhone. Is this also available for the iPad?
There is indeed an iPad version. The iPhone/iPod versions are varied with different planes in each. But the iPad version is sort of a conglomeration, with many of the planes all in the one sim.
I highly recommend it if you’re into flight sims.
-Mike