Instantly recreate training scenarios using situation files

Hi! It’s Randy again, with the X-Plane team. 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 Situation. Type whatever name you want to give to this flight into the text box at the bottom of the window, then click the Save Situation button.

To load a situation in order to fly it again, open the File menu and click Load Situation. Find your .sit file and click Open Situation to load it.

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. (You can find the situation file in the directory X-Plane 10/Output/situations/—just have your friend put it in the same folder on their own computer.)

How to choose the simulator that’s right for you

Previously, I’ve shown you the great things you can do in X-Plane 10—how you can use it to practice approaches, simulate ATC interactions, find high-quality aircraft for it on the Web, and more.

But, maybe X-Plane 10 isn’t right for you. In fact, you can run nearly all of the simulations provided in X-Plane 10 using X-Plane 9, and X-Plane 9 is just $39.

X-Plane 10 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 10 offers the greatest realism in a flight simulator to date, thanks to its new, world-class aircraft models and upgraded global scenery. X-Plane 10 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 10 (meaning you will be unable to benefit from the big improvements we’ve made to the simulator), we recommend purchasing X-Plane 9 instead (you can find it at the bottom of our ordering page).

If you have questions about which version is right for you, shoot me an email at [email protected].

Until next time,

– Randy