Flight simulation has long been used as a flight-training tool. However, flight training is not the only field in which flight simulation is extremely valuable. Flight simulation is used by the aerospace industry for research, development, and testing of new concepts and designs. The possibilities of flight simulation have yet to be fully utilized by schools to further educate students in physics. Simulation can be used to teach performance, stability, design, and a host of other concepts to students. One of the main dilemmas preventing most schools f ...view middle of the document...
It would be much more effective and economical if a school was able to use commercially available, off the shelf software packages to educate students.X-Planeâ is an excellent software package to perform this task. Using X-Planeâ, I was able to make an aircraft and then test fly the airplane. X-Planeâ comes with five pieces of software that makes it possible to do this. The user must enter the information for the airfoil in a program called Part-Maker. The airfoils are then put on the aircraft in Plane-Maker. Plane-Maker is where the user makes the aircraft. All kinds of different airplanes can be made in the program, planes, helicopters, and gyrocopters for instance. Flying the airplanes is a fun experience. All kinds of data can be output from the program and used to see how the aircraft flies.Commercially available software programs can be of great help to students learning physics. Software packages are relatively inexpensive and are designed to run on desktop PCs. X-Planeâ is an excellent commercially available software package that can be employed by students. The software package gave highly reasonable outputs for the types of tests used in this paper. X-Planeâ can be valuable to any physics class where the instructor is trying to teach Bernouli's principle.