X-Plane Tips

Remember the old Microsoft FSX term “Slew”? How do you do that in X-Plane without using a dedicated plugin?

Pause your flight.

Call up the map [M] or use the IOS [Instructor Operating Station]:

Click on the aircraft  icon labelled “You” and it turns yellow:

Drag the yellow icon where you want it, or fill in the Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates and the Altitude.

The map only shows one scenery tile. If you want to drag the icon to a position off the map, move it a little past the edge of the tile, release the mouse and after a second or two the new tile will load with the icon in the middle of the map.

Close the map and un-pause. If you are in flight, expect the aircraft to jump and dive or roll, but you can easily pull out of the dive if you have enough height. If you are on the ground it is straightforward to move to another part of the airport, but if you are thinking about longer distances, be careful not to drag into a mountain or X-Plane will crash. If such a danger exists, rather increase the altitude of the aircraft (while still paused in the map view), move the aircraft, and then adjust the altitude down again before un-pausing.

When you choose your departure airport, you usually type in the city name or the airport name and X-Plane shows you a list of matches, and you select one of them.

However, sometimes X-Plane does not seem to know about an airport even though it should. For example, if you wanted to depart from Ankara, you would get a screen like this:

But that’s crazy!… Ankara is a major city…

Go to Google or Bing and search for the ICAO code of Ankara

Now in X-Plane’s Location panel, instead of typing in of Ankara, type LTAC

And this time, it comes up with the airport name Esenboga, which is Ankara’s main international airport. 

Did you know that X-Plane can display your flight path? It does this by displaying a very thin purple line extending back from the aircraft to the point where you began your flight. 

To make this flight path visible, first pause the flight , then apply the combination, and the flight track appears.

It get’s interesting, however, when you then enable replay mode . Now, you can scrub the timeline to move the aircraft to any position on this purple line. The line in front of the aircraft is not erased, so you can  inspect where you were, what your path was, and exactly how you flew from that scrubbed point onwards.

NOTE: “Scrubbing” is a term used in the video industry to refer to the ability to quickly navigate through a video by dragging a slider or timeline bar back and forth. Scrubbing allows you to quickly navigate through the replay and find the exact position of interest in the flight.

Sometimes, it is difficult to see this thin purple line, so pressing  again creates a translucent “curtain” extending from the purple flight path track to the ground. Personally I find this “curtain” more confusing than the plain thin purple line.

Pressing  a third time turns the flight path track off.

Here is a very basic tip that some X-Plane users use “instinctively” and thereafter find obvious, while others have never discovered it. An astonishing number of users have asked me if there isn’t a better, easier way to pan around than using keyboard shortcuts, assigning keystrokes to joystick buttons, or using an awkward “hat” switch.

The answer is, of course, yes.

Right-drag the mouse.

Simply hold the right mouse button down and move the mouse, and the whole view smoothly pans up/down/left or right, depending on where you drag the mouse.