Hello there!
This month we’ve got an insider interview with one of X-Plane’s newest developers. You also won’t want to miss the two featured airliners or the basics of X-Plane’s automatic logbook.
Q&A with X-Plane developer Tyler Young
Question: What’s your title with X-Plane?
Tyler Young: As a small company, everyone around here wears lots of hats. I’m primarily a software developer working on X-Plane Desktop, but I’m also the resident web developer (for both X-Plane.com and the Scenery Gateway) and one of the handful of people that keep our marketing on track.
Q: Can you provide a little background on yourself?
TY: I’ve been writing X-Plane code for a little over 2 years now. Before that, I was a freelance web developer, and I still do a bit of that on the side. As a college student, I swore to myself I would never get a programming job (a funny thing for a Computer Science major to do!), because debugging drove me crazy. These days, though, I feel like the creative side of programming is enough of a positive to offset the pain of debugging for me. 🙂
Q: What was your first experience that got you into aviation or X-Plane?
I grew up in a family of pilots. My great grandpa was an airline captain with TWA for 30+ years, my grandpa is a CFI, and my dad is a private pilot, so it was kind of inevitable that I would get involved in aviation in some form.
I remember flying X-Plane as a kid with my dad—it must have been X-Plane 5 or something—and my dad being so frustrated that all I wanted to do was crash the planes. (I would have just lost my mind back then if I’d had X-Plane Mobile’s crash sequences!) At some point, that fiendish interest in crashing planes turned into wanting to actually fly them well.
Q: What type of computer set up do you use? Any hardware or accessories you couldn’t live without?
TY: I develop primarily on my 27-inch iMac or my 15-inch Macbook Pro. Here’s what my “office” looks like today:
Left to right, those are: Macbook Pro, my second 27-inch monitor, my iPad, my iMac, and my Saitek Pro Flight yoke.
(This interview has been shortened and edited for space. Read the full interview online.)
Tips and Tricks
Logbooks are an important part of real-life aviation. Pilots use them to keep track of their flight experience in an organized way. Logbooks provide documentation of training that can be used towards certification and time spent keeping currency to comply with regulations. X-Plane takes the work out of logging your experience with a digital logbook that automatically tracks all flights that last longer than three minutes.
To see your logbook, open the File menu and click Logbook. You can load a different one by clicking the Choose Pilot Logbook button and navigating to your logbook, or you can create a new logbook using the New Pilot Logbook button. X-Plane logs:
- Dates of flights
- Tail numbers of aircraft
- Aircraft types
- Airports of departure and arrival
- Number of landings
- Duration of flights
- Time spent flying cross-country, in IFR conditions, and at night
- Total time of all flights
Featured Add Ons
Payware
Are you itching for the smell of avgas, engine oil and aged leather? Yearning for the rumble of 11,200 cubic inches of displacement in 4 massive radial engines? Take a trip into history with the PMDG Douglas DC-6 Cloudmaster!
This model features a fully interactive and animated 3D cockpit that looks 100% authentic when compared to the real world counterpart. Care has been taken to accurately model all the systems, equipment, and sounds. Multiple pop out Manager windows help you manage maintenance, start up, passengers and cargo load, and more. After two years of development, the PMDG Douglas DC-6 Cloudmaster is the accurate, detailed vintage airliner you’ve been waiting for.
Freeware
The Dassault Falcon 7X is a long-range, business class trijet with a large cabin and enough room for 19 passengers. It has a wingspan of 86 feet, a top speed of Mach 0.90, and a range of 5,940 nm. Dassault claims it is the “first aircraft to be designed entirely on a virtual platform.” This freeware version features a custom cockpit and panel, accurate exterior and panel lights, and a detailed manual.
Happy flying!
— The X-Plane Team
