As real as it gets.

X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive and powerful flight simulator for personal computers. With the most realistic flight model available for home users, X-Plane is not just a game--it is an engineering tool that can be (and is) used to predict the flight characteristics of nearly any aircraft with incredible accuracy.

The most realistic is also the most accessible

The same engine used to drive the FAA-certified simulator is available on your desktop PC, whether it's running Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

Real-time flight physics

X-Plane doesn't just regurgitate how an airplane's designer thinks a plane will fly--it calculates for itself the lift, drag, and moment on every surface of the plane individually at every point in time. The result is a flight model more realistic than anything else out there.

The key is blade element breakdown.

X-Plane reads in the geometric shape of any aircraft and then figures out how that aircraft will fly. It does this by an engineering process called "blade element theory," which involves breaking the aircraft down into many small elements and then finding the forces acting on each little element many times per second.