Product Reviews

Flight simulators are the world of that strange creature, the Armchair or Not So Intrepid Birdman, who enjoys everything about the aviation experience except the part where, as the price of failure, you die. As long as that vital condition is satisfied, the player insists on max realism: flight-modelling must be accurate, rendering must be super-smooth, cockpit layout must be authentic and the instruments must all work in real time.

Furthermore, the aviator desires to view the plane from a multiplicity of angles and distances - simultaneously on more than one display - and if possible to vary the weather minutely, chat with air traffic control, and fly anywhere in the world. They would also quite like to have a go designing or at least modifying airframes and test-flying the results. In view of all this, they really need XPlane.

For the first 20 years of the personal computer this niche was dominated by Microsoft's Flight Simulator, as it still is today for Windows users. The Mac version was quietly dropped in the early 1990s, and it wasn't until about five years ago that Laminar Systems' XPlane turned up to fill the gap. As it is vastly more capable than Flight Simulator, XPlane, now at version 7.61, has attracted a cult following. The brainchild of Austin P Meyer, it has actually been used to design a functioning autogyro, subsequently built and flown (for real). When you consider that the entire package - XPlane itself plus the various modules that help you design airframes, components and scenery - only costs about £15, these results are astonishing.

Flying the sim forces you to confront two unshakeable facts: first, decent graphics power is indispensible; second, a joystick or yoke is absolutely essential.

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This is the moment you realise that perhaps the program wasn't so cheap after all, for having bought your joystick, why not consider a throttle quadrant, or rudder pedals or - saddest of all - a 'tactile seat'. Wire this lot up, go to burner and release the brakes.

The plane models are gorgeous, the scenery is breathtaking, the background radio chat isn't too irksome and the navigation aids all work. You can fly anywhere in the world, and also, by way of a change, on Mars (Meyer has tabulated all known Martian meteorological and gravitational data). You can be air-dropped in an X-15 from a B-52 over the Mojave, fight forest fires with a water-bomber, fly helicopters onto oil rigs or Phantoms onto carriers (fat chance). You can try out planes that were never built, like the NASP, or never will be, like the fantasy Anime jet. The aeronautically savvy can fool around with VORs, ILSs and GPS positioning, filing flight plans and taking careful note of the weather. In nearly all cases you will prang, but that's a given.

The downside of all this aero joy lies in the interface, quite easily the worst we have ever encountered on a modern Mac, reminding us horribly of GEM or Windows 1.0. Changing navaid settings - a vital part of the realism of the sim - is a nightmare. Double-clicking is non-existent and entering text into dialog fields is done the hard way, from the end backwards. If you scroll the cockpit view downwards to see all your instruments, the windscreen vanishes. Movies are flaky and unreliable, and any local area network you happen to be on will be screwed up.

The HTML documentation is not only grossly inadequate but wildly out of date, being about version 5.66. What's specifically missing are pilot's notes for each available airframe, and as there are only 30 or so of these this shouldn't be too taxing. Some airframes in earlier versions, like the B-70 bomber, are no longer in the new suite, which seems a sloppy omission. As it is, downloading third-party aircraft from the web is a broadband-only affair due to file sizes.

X-Plane is amazing in more ways than price, and we'd gladly pay four times as much for a proper Mac interface and some decent documentation. If we got all that, plus another 30 or so airframes, you could stuff your tactile seats and your Missions to Mars.