X-Plane 8 DVD Version

Single DVD Version! Everything included.
Includes bound paper manual!

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X-Plane Version 8 is most unusual in that it runs on Windows PC, Macintosh, and Linux systems. All three versions of X-Plane are included on the X-Plane Version 8 DVD that we ship to users.

This is Version 8 on DVD and requires a DVD drive.

The newest X-Plane Version 8 is a comprehensive flight simulator for both PC, Mac, and Linux pilots. It's possibly the most realistic flight model available for personal computers. It can be configured into almost any configuration or task that you can imagine, and it includes design, mapping, and weather tools unlike any other flight sim package available anywhere. X-Plane Version 8 is the software used in the Motus Full-motion flight simulator. Not only is it vast and enormous, it also flies very nicely! It loads faster than ever, and runs at twice the frame-rate as previous versions; the aircraft fly, well, like the real thing! Note: the airplanes are so realistic that they need rudder pedals.

Flexible!

X-Plane Version 8 offers ready-made props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier. Dozens, or even hundreds, of different airplanes are available. This is an amazingly useful tool for pilots, engineers, and designers since you can also design your own aircraft. There is no other package outside of Lockheed's Skunkworks that allows you to design an airplane - and then fly it. You can use it to design real aircraft, or you can fly it as a straight training simulator.		 *

Included Airplanes:

X-Plane Version 8 comes with subsonic, supersonic, and rotorcraft flight dynamics. It includes not only dozens of standard aircraft types, but also exotic and/or supersonic aircraft such as the Bell Tilt-Rotor, and the Concorde. The arodynamics are extremely well-done and each aircraft has a very realistic feel to it, including such nice touches as adverse yaw, and control feel which changes with airspeed. X-Plane Version 8 comes with about 40 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the internet. Tools for designers make up a huge part of X-Plane Version 8. There's a whole lot of new technical features in this new edition.		 *
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Weather:

Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts! Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! If you run into hail, your airplane really gets damaged! If your plane ices up, it really starts to come down like a box of bricks. Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists!

Scenery:

X-Plane Version 8 includes two types of scenery: What X-Plane calls "GENERATION-8 SCENERY" for the USA is RAM intensive; the rest of the world is included, but at a lower resolution (Version 7 scenery). You can choose scenery versions since v8 scenery uses huge amounts or RAM. Some machines (older machines with less RAM, and Macs) will run slower using v8 scenery, so you can turn v8 scenery off and use v7 scenery to speed things up. Some users will be able to upgrade their RAM to enable faster v8 scenery. With either version of scenery, you can land at any of over 18,000 airports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building tops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs. X-Plane 8 also comes with Plane-Maker (to create your own airplanes), World-Maker (to create/update your own airports & scenery), and Weather Briefer (to analyze real weather conditions downloaded from the net).

Failure Modes:

X-Plane 8 also has detailed failure-modeling, with systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, and landing gear at any moment.

While X-Plane 8 is the world's most COMPREHENSIVE flight sim, it's also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design, or for the planes that come with the sim. You can either use it as a simple flight sim, or as a training tool, as a design tool, or as an engineering tool.

Intuitive Aircraft Design:

Use Plane-Maker to enter your own aircraft designs... whether it's the airplane you fly every day, the homebuilt you are building in your garage, the dream-machine that you would love to own some day, or simply some wild flight of fancy, you can fly it now! Plane-Maker lets you simply point and click to enter data, and then plots the aircraft on the screen so you can be sure that everything "looks right" before taking your machine flying! Remember, you need only enter the airplane's DIMENSIONS... X-Plane 8 will FIGURE OUT how the airplane will fly based on these dimensions! Therefore, you do NOT need to know in advance how the airplane will fly! You enter the GEOMETRY of the aircraft, and X-Plane 8 will FIGURE OUT how it will fly based on that geometry.

System Requirements:

X-Plane Version 8 is the software used in the Motus Full-motion flight simulator. But it also runs on desktop systems. X-Plane Version 8 runs on PC, Mac, and Linux 2.6; a DVD drive is required.
  X-Plane 8.x
Windows CPU Pentium 1ghz+
Macintosh CPU PowerMac 800+
RAM (v7 scenery) n/a
RAM (v8 scenery on PC) 512 meg
RAM (v8 scenery on Mac) 1024 meg
Disk Space 8 gig
CD-ROM any
3-D CARD OpenGL
VRAM 16 meg
Monitor 1024x768+
Joystick/Yoke USB

More RAM handles more scenery! The faster your CPU, the better the frame-rate! Note that Macs require more RAM to handle big scenery since Macs don't cache scenery like PCs.

X-Plane Version 8 is a 3-D accelerated program, which means that it needs a decent CPU and a 3-D accelerator card to run. 3-D accelerator cards are designed specifically to do high-speed graphics, so they work many times faster than your CPU ever could. The three languages of 3-D accelerator cards are OpenGL, Direct-3D, and Glide. X-Plane Version 8 on PCs use OpenGL and requires Direct-X 8+, plus at least 512mb of system RAM. You must therefore have a 3-D accelerator card that can run OpenGL to use X-Plane Version 8's latest software. 1024x768 video is supported (way excellent)!

Joystick options should start with CH Products yoke , plus rudder pedals. X-plane flies like a real airplane and needs rudder pedals. You can't keep the propeller-planes straight on the runway without rudder pedals. Two throttles are a nice touch when flying twins. Logitech joysticks are hopelessly slow and sluggish - don't even think of flying X-Plane Version 8 with a Logitech unit! Helicopters (X-Plane includes the R22) are difficult to fly without a collective (a joystick works OK as cyclic); a separate CH Pro Throttle can be rigged to work like a collective.

Installing X-Plane Version 8:

Click here for Installation Instructions.

Read what the media has to say:

Click here for complete text of Flying Magazine review.