More X-Plane: ATC, Emergency and Special Situations

The 3 things you need to know about air traffic control in X-Plane

Today I’d like to share with you 3 things you need to know to use the air traffic control in X-Plane.

1. You have to file a flight plan before interacting with the ATC. Do so by pressing Enter on the keyboard to bring up the ATC menu, then selecting “File Flight Plan.”
2. Your COM1 radio must be tuned to the proper frequency for whatever ATC controller you want to communicate with. For instance, if you’re at KSEA (Seattle-Tacoma International Airport), this means you need to tune to 128.00 to request clearance, 121.70 to get ground (taxi) clearance, and 119.90 to check in with the tower before takeoff. (If those frequencies are a bit bewildering, don’t worry—you can find them all by searching for KSEA in the Airnav database.)
3. Just like in the real world, you should check in with each controller as you get handed off to them. This tells the controller that you’re ready to receive instructions as necessary.

For a step-by-step guide through a flight guided by the ATC, check out the writeup in the X-Plane 10 manual titled Working with the Air Traffic Control.

Instantly recreate training scenarios using situation files

This situation is essentially a “snapshot” of your flight. It will remember which aircraft you’re flying, its speed, heading, and location (both altitude and latitude/longitude), as well as all the features of the environment (clouds, wind, time of day, and so on). When you load a situation, X-Plane will immediately set all those features to exactly what they were when you saved the situation.

To create a situation (a .sit file), move the mouse to the top of the screen, click File, then click Save Situation. Type whatever name you want to give to this flight into the text box at the bottom of the window, then click the Save Situation button.

To load a situation in order to fly it again, open the File menu and click Load Situation. Find your .sit file and double click on it to load the situation.

This is especially useful for quickly loading and practicing a specific type of approach or emergency situation. The situations can even be sent to other X-Plane users; all they need is the situation file that you created. (You can find the situation file in the directory X-Plane 10/Output/situations/—just have your friend put it in the same folder on their own computer.)

How to choose the simulator that’s right for you

Previously, I’ve shown you the great things you can do in X-Plane 10—how you can use it to practice approaches, simulate ATC interactions, find high-quality aircraft for it on the Web, and more.

But, maybe X-Plane 10 isn’t right for you. In fact, you can run nearly all of the simulations provided in X-Plane 10 using X-Plane 9, and X-Plane 9 is just $39.

X-Plane 10 may not be right for you if you have a very old computer (say, 4 years old or more) or a very low-end computer (one with an integrated graphics card). X-Plane 10 offers the greatest realism in a flight simulator to date, thanks to its new, world-class aircraft models and upgraded global scenery. X-Plane 10 also is the only simulator for which we are constantly creating updates, which add new aircraft, new features, and more. However, if your computer is unable to run X-Plane 10 (meaning you will be unable to benefit from the big improvements we’ve made to the simulator), we recommend purchasing X-Plane 9 instead (you can find it at the bottom of our ordering page).

Preparing for emergencies

Simulating failures

X-Plane can simulate a huge number of systems failures. This lets you experience what happens when important pieces of equipment don’t do what they’re supposed to in flight, making you better prepared for these situations in the real world. You can configure these failures using the Equipment Failures window. To open this window, move your mouse to the top of the screen (causing the menu to appear), then click Aircraft, then click Equipment Failures.

The World/MTBF tab of the Equipment Failures window controls things outside of the airplane, such as bird strikes and airport equipment failures. You can also use the control at the bottom of the window here (labeled use mean time between failures, random failures) to make all systems fail randomly. When this box is checked, the simulator will use the value to the right to determine how often, on average, each piece of equipment will fail. For instance, if the MTBF is set to 1000 hours, X-Plane will decide that each piece of hardware in the plane has about a one in a thousand chance of breaking each hour. Since the airplane has a few hundred pieces of hardware, that means a failure might occur every 5 to 20 hours or so.

The other tabs in this window let you set the frequency of specific failures for hundreds of different aircraft systems. You can even set a system to simply “inoperative,” meaning it has already failed.

The general failure categories available to you are:

• Misc. Equipment
• Instruments
• Engines
• Flying Surfaces
• G1000 (if you have a real G1000 attached to X-Plane)
• NAVAIDs

Signing off now …

If you’re still using the demo, remember that you can upgrade to X-Plane 10 Globalat any time. Doing so will remove the time limit from the simulator, and you’ll get the global scenery package to boot.

More Addons

Tools for flight training

Today I’d like to share with you a few things you can do with X-Plane that are perfect for flight training.

1. Fly with a real-world EFIS

You can use your iPhone or iPad as a 100% realistic flight display. The display is called Xavion, and it’s being used in real cockpits as we speak.

Here’s what Xavion does:

• Serves as a backup to the plane’s primary instruments—airspeed indicator, artificial horizon, and so on
• Provides advanced synthetic vision so you always know exactly what the terrain is like around you
• Provides highway-in-the-sky guidance to your destination
• Estimates your fuel expenditure at various speeds and altitudes, so you can fly as fast or as efficiently as you want
• Provides emergency guidance to the safest nearby airport in an engine-out situation

Flying it in X-Plane

Here’s the great news: if you have an iPhone or iPad, you can use Xavion with X-Plane. So, first download Xavion and install it on your iPhone or iPad.

Once you’ve downloaded it, click here for instructions on setting up Xavion with X-Plane.

Flying in the real world with Xavion

Xavion is not just a great EFIS display for X-Plane—you can use it in a real airplane as

• a synthetic vision system,
• a backup instrument panel,
• a highway-in-the-sky navigation tool,
• a weight-and-balance calculator, and even
• an engine-out emergency landing tool.

Garmin charges thousands of dollars for a synthetic vision system.

No one else even offers an emergency landing planner like this.

Using your iPhone or iPad, you can have the situational awareness and safety fromboth these features every time you fly. One pilot calls it “the most significant advance in aviation safety since the parachute.”

In order to use Xavion in your real-world cockpit, you can buy Xavion from the App Store. It’s a fraction of the cost of a Garmin system, and a fraction of the cost of an off-airport landing if you ever have an engine-out.

Download Xavion for use in a real plane

2. Practice startup procedures

By default, X-Plane starts your aircraft on the runway, with engines running, ready to take off. If you prefer to start your own engines or taxi from an apron (also called a ramp) onto the runway, you can do so by opening the Settings menu and clicking Operations & Warnings. There, in the pane labeled “Startup,” you can un-check the box labeled Start each flight with engines running or check the box labeled Start each flight on ramp.

Note that not all aircraft models have panels built for to simulate a full start-up sequence. The Boeing 747 model in X-Plane 10 is one that does model this accurately. You can watch a video of the 747 startup procedure if you’re interested.

3. Get real-time charts and plates on your iPhone or iPad

Using an app called ForeFlight (available in the App Store), you can get charts and approach plates on your iPhone or iPad. Previously, this tool was only for use when flying in the real world, but now you can also use it in simulated flights in X-Plane.

To do so, you’ll need to have your iPhone/iPad on the same wireless network as the computer you run X-Plane on. For all the details, check out the full writeup in the user manual.

4. Use an Instructor Operator Station with a flight instructor

X-Plane supports the use of an Instructor Operator Station (IOS), a console used by a flight instructor in order to fail systems in the student’s aircraft, change the weather and time of day, or relocate the aircraft. The IOS can be run either on the same computer as the simulator (using a second monitor), or it can be a separate computer which connects to the student’s computer (either on the same network or over the Internet).

For details on setting up an IOS, check out the writeup in the user manual.

5. Fly with a copilot

By connecting two computers running X-Plane together on the same network, you can have two users flying together in the same cockpit. Even better, you can have each pilot see a different half of the instrument panel!

To do so, you’ll need two computers, each running their own copy of X-Plane, connected to the same network. You’ll also need two copies of the aircraft you intend to fly. By modifying that airplane’s instrument panel, you can set up the copilot’s view.

For all the details, see the section of the user manual titled “Setting Up a Copilots Station.”

6. Replay your takeoffs and landings to see how you’re doing

Visualizing a 3-D path in X-Plane

X-Plane offers a couple different ways to visualize the path taken by your aircraft.

See the path traveled by your airplane in 3-D

The path taken by an aircraft up to its current location can always be seen as a trail behind the aircraft when you toggle the 3-D flight path on. To do so, either press Ctrl + p on the keyboard, or move the mouse to the top of the screen, click on the Aircraft menu, and click Cycle 3-D Flight Path. Doing so once will cause X-Plane to display a violet-striped line behind the aircraft. Cycling the flight path again will put that line into perspective by drawing lines intermittently from the flight path to the ground. Cycling it once more will give a semi-transparent black bar extending from the flight path to the ground (seen in the image above). Cycling the path once more will turn off the flight path lines.

To reset the 3-D flight path, either press Alt + p on the keyboard, or open the Aircraft menu and click Reset 3-D Flight Path. The flight path will also be reset whenever you load an aircraft or a location.

Replay your flight up to this point

You can replay your flight, from the last time you loaded an aircraft or a location up to your current location, by toggling the replay mode on. This can be done either by pressing Ctrl + r or by opening the Aircraft menu and clicking Toggle Replay Mode. In the top of the window, you will see shuttle controls to (listed left to right):

• stop playback,
• play backward faster than real-time,
• play backward at real-time speed,
• play backward slower than real-time,
• pause playback,
• play forward slower than real-time,
• play forward at real-time speed,
• play forward faster than real-time, and
• stop playback.

Additionally, you can click the shuttle slider and drag it to quickly jump around in the playback. To return to the flight, either press Alt + , (Alt + comma) or open the Aircraft menu and click Toggle Replay Mode once again.