Hi! This is the seventh email in the course on getting the most out of X-Plane. Today I’d like to share with you how you can use X-Plane to create reusable “situations,” letting you instantly set up a training scenario in the future.

This situation is essentially a “snapshot” of your flight. It will remember which aircraft you’re flying, its speed, heading, and location (both altitude and latitude/longitude), as well as all the features of the environment (clouds, wind, time of day, and so on). When you load a situation, X-Plane will immediately set all those features to exactly what they were when you saved the situation.

To create a situation (a .sit file), move the mouse to the top of the screen, click File, then click Save Flight. Type whatever name you want to give to this flight into the File Name field in the window, then click the Save button.

To load a situation in order to fly it again, open the File menu and click Load Flight. Find your .sit file and click Load Flight to load it. (Don’t forget you can also load a flight immediately after starting X-Plane from the main menu.)

This is especially useful for quickly loading and practicing a specific type of approach or emergency situation. The situations can even be sent to other X-Plane users; all they need is the situation file that you created.

How to choose the simulator that’s right for you

Previously, I’ve shown you the great things you can do in X-Plane 11–how you can use it to practice approaches, simulate ATC interactions, visualize your flight path, and more.

But, maybe X-Plane 11 isn’t right for you. In fact, you can run nearly all of the simulations provided in X-Plane 11 using X-Plane 10, and X-Plane 10 is just $59.

X-Plane 11 may not be right for you if you have a very old computer (say, 4 years old or more) or a very low-end computer (one with an integrated graphics card). X-Plane 11 offers the greatest realism in a flight simulator to date, thanks to its new, world-class aircraft models and upgraded global scenery. X-Plane 11 also is the only simulator for which we are constantly creating updates which add new aircraft, new features, and more. However, if your computer is unable to run X-Plane 11, we recommend purchasing X-Plane 10 instead (you can find it at the bottom of our ordering page).

Until next time,

-Team X-Plane