Hi! Randy Witt here, from the X-Plane team. This is the final email in the course on getting the most out of X-Plane. For this last email in our series, I’d like to show you a few ways you can find out more about X-Plane in the future.

Join an X-Plane user community

If you want to connect with other X-Plane users, to chat about your favorite situations, aircraft, etc., or to get help doing particular tasks, you should join one of our user communities. The most popular one is the X-Plane.org forum, but you might also consider the AVSIM X-Plane forums, the X-Plane Freeware forums, or the X-Pilot forums.

Get the latest X-Plane news

If you want to hear about the latest X-Plane news, follow us on Facebook or on Twitter. You can also check our news blog for updates.

Get more, high-quality aircraft

If you’ve already checked out the free aircraft available at X-Plane.org and the X-Plane France site, you might be interested in some non-free aircraft (“payware”). My favorite aircraft come from 3 different aircraft modelers: X-Aviation, Jason Chandler of C74.net, and Carenado.

These aircraft models cost about $30 on average, but to a large extent, you get what you pay for: these designers include gorgeous 3-D models of both the cockpit and the exterior of the aircraft, with the highest quality flight models available (checked for performance against the real thing!).

Download custom scenery

Just like custom aircraft, you can download custom scenery packages. The best place to start looking is the X-Plane.org Scenery page, or any of the other user forums listed earlier in this email.

Just like when you download a custom aircraft, you’ll probably have to uncompress a ZIP file, but instead of copying its contents into your Aircraft folder, copy it to the Custom Scenery folder (found in the X-Plane 11 directory, which is located on the Desktop by default). Then, the next time you launch X-Plane and travel to that location, you’ll see your custom scenery there instead of the default.

Signing off now …

If you’re still using the demo, remember that you can upgrade to X-Plane 10 Global at any time to remove the time limit from the simulator and get the full global scenery package to boot.

All the best,

– – X-Plane Customer Support