Aircraft Systems

How X-plane works

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Watch how ATC works

If you are a new user of X-Plane, learning to fly properly, and you are confused about how ATC works, X-Plane can help you by showing you how it is done.

Start a new flight from any metropolitan airport (Mid size – not an airstrip but not a large international). Choose a small GA aircraft. Ideally, in an area you are familiar with in real life.

Set the weather to “Marginal VFR Overcast” and precipitation at “Moderate”. Set a wind speed of  16kts at an altitude of 4000ft

WeatherSettings.jpg

Click “A.I. Flies Your Aircraft” from the Flight pull-down menu:

ai flies pull down.jpg

After a while, the aircraft will come to life, and you will see the ATC panel. A.I. will choose a destination airport and will automatically take off, fly the route and land. All you need to do is watch the ATC conversation and see what ATC says,  how the AI pilot replies, and then how “he” reacts. It is particularly useful to do this in cloud conditions where you cannot see the ground and quickly lose orientation. Watch how the A.I. pilot relies on instruments and ATC instructions. Watch how quickly the A.I. obeys ATC.
Once the flight is complete, try it yourself without A.I.
Remember to “read back” every communication ATC sends you.

Note – when trying this tip, set the number of A.I. aircraft to zero.

RemoveAIAircraft.jpg

When there are many A.I. Aircraft around, ATC often gets very slow.

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Taxi with a large aircraft

In large commercial aircraft, a nosewheel tiller is used to more accurately align the nosewheel to the taxi lines, and to get the aircraft safely docked at jetways.

You can assign an axis on your joystick to control this tiller by opening Settings –> Joystick and look for an axis that you have not assigned to anything. Every axis that X-Plane recognizes on your peripheral(s) will be listed In the AXES column. Once you have found an available axis assign it to nosewheel tiller. This will not interfere with the pedals axis or the yaw axis.

Note that this is the same procedure used in setting up the joystick axes normally, as described in the section “Configuring Flight Controls” in the X-Plane online manual.

The nosewheel tiller is used to make larger turn corrections when taxi-ing and the rudder pedals are used to make small inputs such as on takeoff roll and final alignment to your jetway.

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Spongey Taxi-ing with the Default Cessna C172

Have you ever cursed X-plane and swore that the simulator was not working realistically when making an initial take-off run in a Cessna C172? It seems to do all sorts of ridiculous weaving.
I am not referring to the well-known fact that it pulls to the left and is quite correctly modeled – the spiralling slipstream propwash effect – but it might surprise you that the spongey effect of steering/correction/over-correcting with the nose wildly swerving left and right is also quite realistic. Essentially the reason for this spongey effect is because the real cessna 172 does not have a direct mechanical link to the rudder, but uses a spring-loaded system.
This effect is actually correctly modeled in X-plane despite your screaming at your yoke in frustration!.

For an explanation of what is actually happening, have a look at this article from the Cessna Owner Organization. There you will finally get an explanation for what you might initially have thought is a bad flight model or a faulty peripheral controller.

The solution? Firm but gentle pressure avoiding sharp yoke and pedal movements.

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Some Bullet-form Tips for Using X-Plane 12

Stability

  • Disable Unnecessary Plugins. Unused or incompatible plugins can tank performance. This is the #1 Stability tip of all time. Don’t just disable them; remove them from the directory hierarchy.
  • Optimize, but do not overclock your CPU or your graphics card
  • Cool your motherboard, RAM, and M2 SSDs. More than passive chassis fan cooling is required.
  • Use a UPS [UN-interruptible Power Supply] and an over-specced PSU [Power Supply Unit]

Graphics Optimization

  • Tweak Render Settings. Lower the visual effects (e.g., shadows, reflections, and antialiasing) if performance lags. Balance quality and frame rate for your hardware.
  • Try FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution). X-Plane 12 supports AMD FSR, which can boost performance without significant visual loss.
  • Monitor VRAM Usage: High texture settings can overload your VRAM. Use the “Texture Quality” slider to optimize.

Aircraft Handling

  • Calibrate Controllers. Properly calibrate yokes, pedals, and throttle quadrants in the settings menu to ensure smooth aircraft control.
  • Adjust Control Sensitivity. Use the sensitivity sliders to fine-tune aircraft response, especially if it feels too twitchy.
  • Study the Flight Model Adjustment. X-Plane’s physics engine is advanced – experiment with “Flight Model per Frame” in the settings if you encounter unrealistic behaviour.

Weather System

  • Real Weather Accuracy. Ensure you’re connected to the internet for real-time weather updates. If the weather seems incorrect, force a refresh in the settings.
  • Adjust Turbulence Sensitivity. The new weather system is more dynamic. If turbulence feels overdone, tweak the realism sliders.

Customizing Views

  • Save Custom Camera Angles. Use the [Ctrl] + [number keys] to save cockpit or external views and quickly recall them with the corresponding number key.
  • Use Free Camera Mode. [c] or [Shift] + [4] activates free camera mode, great for screenshots or inspecting scenery.

Multiplayer and ATC

  • Use Default ATC. While not perfect, X-Plane 12’s ATC has improved tremendously over the past year. The latest update, 12.1.3 (about to be released – Time of writing: Late November), contains a huge ATC system update.
  • If you feel more confident, join online networks like VATSIM, IVAO, or PilotEdge for realistic ATC and multiplayer flying.

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How to quickly close the 2D panel of the G530

To pop-up the 2D panel of the G530 and G430 is easy – just click it. But closing it again can require a few keystrokes and is a little confusing since it is in an X-Plane-style window and not a more familiar window.
However, you can easily close it by moving the mouse cursor up to the LEFT-hand top corner of the pop-up and a small red dot will appear:

Close a popup.jpg

Clicking this red dot immediately dismisses the 2D window.
More traditionally, if you click the upper RIGHT-hand corner you can transform this pop-up into a more conventional window.

Alternatively, you can also close the 2D window by clicking on the 3D panel of the G530 and G430 a second time.

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File flight plan with ATC before entering it into the FMC

Which comes first, the “chicken or the egg”?
When you are planning an IFR flight, it’s always a good idea to file your flight plan with ATC before actually entering it into the FMC. In the days when X-Plane had a far less capable ATC system it did not matter much when you filed a flight plan in the ATC window,. You would get it from the FMC. Now that SIDs and STARs are accepted by the X-Plane 12 ATC system, if you are entering the flight plan directly into the FMS first, there is a 50/50 chance that ATC will not accept the flight plan that you proposed. Maybe your desired runway is not in operation today (weather or some other reason) or maybe a waypoint is not recognized. Then you have to go right back to the planning stage and change things around to a greater or lesser extent.

If you first put in your SID, waypoints and STAR and ATC accepts them, then you can go to the trouble of entering it all into the FMS afterwards. If you are loading your FMS from the output of your flight planner and then filing it with ATC, you run into the same problem.

While not so convenient in X-Plane because you are a “one man band”, in real aviation the flight plan is actually entered into the FMS as late as possible – certainly after the flight plan has been filed. So this tip brings us a step closer to real aviation.

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The useful Freeflight.prf file

After each successful flight, X-Plane stores a whole lot of information from the flight of each aircraft you have flown with, which is used as starting data for the next flight. Its worth having a look into this file and see exactly what is saved there. The entries are sometimes somewhat cryptic, but it’s easy to figure them out. You can find this file in the …X-Plane 12\Output\preferences folder.

These entries can happily be changed (It’s just a text file) if you are unhappy with the numbers, or even deleted of they are screwed up. X-Plane will replace anything deleted with it’s default value.

For example, the fuel left over from the previous flight (shown in red), or the payloads (shown in Blue) of a particular aircraft (in this case the Cessna 172) is stored in these lines:

P _weight_and_balance _AircraftLaminarResearchCessna172SPCessna172SPG1000acf {“weight”:{“deicefluid_in_liters”:0.0,”deice_holdover_time_in_minutes”:0.0,”fueltank_weight_in_kilograms”:[39.641891479492188,39.641849517822266,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0],”oxygen_pressure_in_millibars”:0.0,”payload_weight_in_kilograms”:[41.788509368896484,41.788509368896484,34.190597534179688,34.190597534179688,22.793731689453125,9.4973878860473633]}}

You can either change these values (don’t worry about the numbers after the decimal point),
or simply delete the whole entry and when you begin a flight with that particular aircraft X-Plane will load the aircraft with it’s default fuel (usually half-full tanks) and default payload.

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Saving a Flight does not save the entered Flightplan

When you have populated the FMS [Flight Management System] from your flight planner, always save the flight plan from within your FMS. The saved flight plan is saved as new file in …X-Plane 12\Output\FMS plans folder called XXXXYYYY.fms where XXXX is usually the departure ICAO code and the YYYY the arrival  ICAO code.

Question: Why should this be necessary?
Answer: If we ever want to quit the flight and then resume it, saving the flight situation will NOT save the FMS information when flying a default X-Plane aircraft. (Third-party aircraft may be different and often have special systems to do this, however.) 

So, if we have this file and then load the saved flight, it is easy to restore the Flight Plan into the FMS. From there, we can load the flight plan back into the ATC window by importing it from the FMS by clicking the button: image.jpeg

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Entering a Flight Plan while Paused

Here’s a tip that I learned through bitter experience.

When entering a flight plan into the default G1000 (or even the G530), do NOT pause the simulation while manually entering the way-points or procedures. While it appears to work fine if you enter the fields while paused, occasionally (but not always) the GPS gets confused and corrupts the visual display – sending tracks between way-points to Timbuktu and back! It is not only the graphical map display. The flight plan itself gets corrupted even if the listing looks OK in the MFD.

I don’t think this is a bug since it is logical to assume that a bit of processing goes on in the background when calculating the GPS display. If X-Plane is paused, presumably whatever processing it is doing does not happen.  I am not sure whether this has always been a problem or only in recent versions. Certainly the problem is in X-Plane 12.11.

So learn from someone who spent an entire day tearing his hair out in frustration – DO NOT PAUSE X-PLANE WHILE ENTERING A FLIGHT PLAN! 😤
Provided X-Plane is un-paused, entering the exact same flight-plan works perfectly.

If time runs away with you because it took so long to enter the flight-plan, reset back to an earlier time once the flight plan has been entered and saved.

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Why does X-Plane do strange things? Understand and get proper control

If X-Plane seems to act in an unpredictable way, here is possibly (IMHO) the best video that Austin has ever produced. It’s quite old but still completely valid.
It’s a brilliant explanation for why single-engined aircraft veer to the left, or why flaps have non-intuitive side-effects. He also deals with joystick sensitivity issues.

The video is definitely worth a refresh-look. Click here.