


X-Plane is capable of modeling fairly complex aircraft designs, including helicopters, rockets, rotor craft and tilt-rotor craft. This approach allows users to design aircraft on their computer quickly and easily, as the simulator engine will show immediately how an aircraft with a particular design might perform in the real world. When this process is applied to each component, the simulated aircraft will fly virtually like its real counterpart does. With Blade-element theory, a wing, for example, may be made up of many sections (1 to 4 is typical), and each section is further divided into as many as 10 separate sections, then the lift and drag of each section is calculated, and the resulting effect is applied to the whole aircraft. Blade-element theory and other computational aerodynamic models can be used to compute aerodynamic forces in real time or to pre-compute aerodynamic forces of a new design for later use in a traditional lookup table type of simulator. It is a way of modeling the forces and moments on an aircraft by individually evaluating the parts that constitute it. These simulators do a good job of simulating the flight characteristics of the aircraft they were designed to simulate (those with previously-known aerodynamic data), but are not useful in design work, and do not predict the performance of aircraft when the actual figures are not available.īlade-element theory is one method of improving on this. Traditionally, flight simulators try to emulate the real-world performance of an aircraft by using lookup tables to find previously-known aerodynamic forces such as lift or drag, which vary with flight condition. X-Plane differentiates itself by implementing an aerodynamic model known as blade element theory.
