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6 CHAPTER 1. ABOUT X-PLANE
Aerospace, a small aerospace tech firm working, on some excellent but unusual designs that I cannot
discuss in detail.
I must digress here for a moment because this is interesting and also applicable to one of the
aircraft in X-Plane. One of the projects that DuPont was working on back then was the well-known
NASP, or National Aerospace Plane, a single-stage-to-orbit aircraft that can, in theory, take off
from a runway and fly clear to orbit. Tony DuPont, the president of the company, was the founder
of this ingenious NASP concept. While the Space Shuttle and other conventional rockets use rocket
engines to blast up to their orbital speed (18,000 mph), the NASP breathes air to run its engines,
so it must do most of its acceleration in the atmosphere. This use of the oxygen in the atmosphere,
rather than carrying liquid oxygen on board, makes the vehicle much more light and efficient, but
it also means that the aircraft must fly at many, many thousands of miles per hour in the air, which
creates tremendous heat and drag. Circulating cool fuel through the skin of an aircraft is not a new
idea... in fact the bell-shaped nozzles on most rocket engines employ this technology to keep them
from melting! For the NASP, this is one of the few options that will keep the skin temperatures
down and allow hypersonic flight (that is, flight at five times the speed of sound or greater). You
might think that using an insulated tile system like the one the Space Shuttle has would be a
good option, but maintaining and replacing thousands of small tiles would be problematic, bulky,
and expensive. Of course, circulating fuel to keep the skin cool has its drawbacks too! The SR-71
Blackbird uses its cool fuel to keep its surface temperatures down, and in fact is limited to much
lower speeds than Mach 3 when low on fuel because there is nothing left to absorb the heat! Open
the SR-71 in X-Plane and rather than seeing a red line on the airspeed indicator (like just about
every other aircraft) to indicate maximum allowable speed, there is a whole red arc! That big red
region is the speed range that you can only operate in if you have enough fuel in the tanks to soak
up the heat from atmospheric friction! How far into the red zone you are allowed to fly depends on
your remaining fuel load—Now you know.
Anyway, enough about the fascinating NASP concept. That summer in 1988, while living in San
Diego, I took an instrument currency flight to keep my IFR skills sharp, and had a very difficult
time getting up to speed in the crowded, fast-paced, hectic ATC system of San Diego after the
relative slow and laid-back ATC operations back home in South Carolina. After finally getting my
IFR skills up to a comfortable level (requiring about three or four flights), I decided that I wanted
an instrument trainer to keep my IFR skills up to snuff. Microsoft Flight Simulator was pretty
much the only game in town back then, and I was pretty disappointed in what I found. Microsoft
was running on the little baby Macintoshes back then, which was great, but there were a few other
little things I wanted done differently as well, and I knew Microsoft would not change their sim
just to suit me. Thus, X-Plane was born, at the time called “Archer-II IFR.” I used this program
for several years to keep up my instrument currency.
A bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University soon followed, and during
my engineering studies there I expanded “Archer-II IFR” to be able to simulate almost any airplane
imaginable by simply plugging in the blueprints for that airplane, and letting the sim then figure
out how the plane should fly based on those blueprints. This is completely opposite how most
any other simulator works and is by far the largest and most important differentiator between
X-Plane and its competitors. I started to use the simulator to test out various aircraft designs I had
conceived, and quickly learned that Cessna, Piper, Lancair, and Mooney build the way they do for
a very good reason—my designs were efficient, but too difficult to fly safely. Later, I renamed the
program “X-Plane” in honor of the series of aircraft tested at Edwards Air Force Base in the ’60s
and continuing through today.
More about Austin can be read on the Austin’s Adventures blog.