"The acid test for all this is of course, how does it fly? In general the answer has to be "very well". The first thing that hits you when you fly XPlane is just how smooth and realistic the simulation feels. It's very convincing and it's easy to see that the fight modeling system is getting a lot of things right. If you have accurate data to feed into the Plane Maker application you'll end up with performance in the critical areas of top speed, climb rates and stall speeds that are within a few percent of published values."

Of course, if you just want to fly other people's airplanes, XPlane comes with about 30 ready-made airplanes on the CD, and you can download endless numbers of others on the internet!