X-Plane 10.20 / 10.21 RC 2

X-Plane is a fun, easy to play, powerful flight simulator that has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers.

It includes jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as helicopters, gliders and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.

X-Plane has more than 40 aircrafts that span the aviation industry (and history), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the internet.

X-Plane has a world wide scenery and even includes Mars! (thanks to the Mars Orbiting Laser Altimeter, which mapped that planet's elevation) You can land at any of over 18,000 airports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building tops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs.

X-Plane provides you with an accurate flight experience and excels in user-customizability, versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions) and downloadable aircrafts.

Here are some key features of "X-Plane":

· Done only once during initialization, X-Plane breaks the wing(s), horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer(s), and propeller(s) (if equipped) down into a finite number of elements. The number of elements is decided by the user in Plane-Maker. Ten elements per side per wing or stabilizer is the maximum, and studies have shown that this provides roll rates and accelerations that are very close to the values that would be found with a much larger number of elements.
· This is done twice per cycle. The aircraft linear and angular velocities, along with the longitudinal, lateral, and vertical arms of each element are considered to find the velocity vector of each element. Downwash, propwash, and induced angle of attack from lift-augmentation devices are all considered when finding the velocity vector of each element.
· Propwash is found by looking at the area of each propeller disk, and the thrust of each propeller. Using local air density, X-Plane determines the propwash required for momentum to be conserved.
· Downwash is found by looking at the aspect ratio, taper ratio, and sweep of the wing, and the horizontal and vertical distance of the "washed surface" (normally the horizontal stabilizer) from the "washing surface" (normally the wing), and then going to an empirical look-up table to get the degrees of downwash generated per coefficient of lift.
· The airfoil data entered in Part-Maker is 2-dimensional, so X-Plane applies finite wing lift-slope reduction, finite-wing CLmax reduction, finite-wing induced drag, and finite-wing moment reduction appropriate to the aspect ratio, taper ratio, and sweep of the wing, horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer, or propeller blade in question. Compressible flow effects are considered using Prandtl-Glauert, but transonic effects are not simulated other than an empirical mach-divergent drag increase. In supersonic flight, the airfoil is considered to be a diamond shape with the appropriate thickness ratio... pressures behind the shock waves are found on each of the plates in the diamond-shaped airfoil and summed to give the total pressures on the foil element.
· Using the coefficients just determined in step 3, areas determined during step 1, and dynamic pressures (determined separately for each element based on aircraft speed, altitude, temperature, propwash and wing sweep), the forces are found and summed for the entire aircraft. Forces are then divided by the aircraft mass for linear accelerations, and moments of inertia for angular accelerations.

Requirements:

· 2 GHz, multi-core CPU (3 GHz, multi-core CPU recommended)
· 2 GB of RAM (4 GB of RAM recommended)
· Video card with 512 MB of on-board, dedicated VRAM (video card with 1 GB of on-board recommended)

Limitations:

· The demo version will stop the joystick after 10 minutes.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Reverted change to light sizes when monitor resolution changes. This means airplanes look the way they did X-Plane 10.5, 10.11 and 10.20.
· Fixed pitot heat switch on new C172 in 3-d cockpit.