A Focus on the Flight Model

With blade element theory, he adds, “You get maybe 20 percent more results from maybe a thousand percent more work. [But] most people are out to make quick money with minimal investment. I mean, they definitely focus on the scenery and not the flight model. And with me, it’s the other way around. Other people have used blade element theory in industry and research,” he says, “but certainly no one else has done it for personal computers, Macintosh or Windows.”

So what, exactly, feels more authentic with X-Plane? “It’s the way the airplanes interact with the air,” Meyer says, “how they handle at different speeds, the way they take off, climb, descend, turn, and maneuver. It’s the way the controls feel kind of sloppy and loose at low speed, but the plane gets tight and responsive as you speed up. The way you can slip the airplane sideways and increase the drag, and then kind of settle down more quickly. The way when you lower the nose, you build up speed and increase your ability to maneuver.”

X-Plane is so accurate that some entrepreneurs use it to test-fly their prototype aircraft. One such company is Carter Aviation Technologies, developer of the CarterCopter, a new generation of personal rotor craft. When founder Jay Carter first contacted Meyer, he’d already test-flown his prototype a few times.

But X-Plane allowed Carter and his pilots to log hours and hours on the CarterCopter without ever leaving the hangar. When you have a fairly complex prototype, it only takes one fuel pump malfunctioning to scrub an entire day’s mission,” says Meyer. “It’s hard to test fly when you have four or five hundred systems that all have to work right. So the simulator frees them from all that. They just fire up their Mac and test-fly all day long, and don’t have those technical headaches you have with real airplanes. It’s just good old practice.