The news comes only a few days after Austin Meyer, the developer behind the sophisticated flight sim software, posted a detailed message to the X-Plane e-mail list saying that an iPhone port of the game was not possible. In retrospect, Meyer was just having some fun at his customers’ expense.
The desktop version of X-Plane 9 is known for its expandability and flexibility; users can add new detailed terrain maps, new airplane models and can adjust a vast array of parameters. Obviously, the iPhone version had to be scaled down, but many of X-Plane’s hallmark characteristics remain intact: You can adjust time of day, weather, sky conditions and turbulence characteristics; you can also choose from four different models of aircraft, including a personal jet.
The iPhone application lets you fly around the area of Innsbruck, Austria, which Laminar Research says is home to challenging mountains and topography for aviation.
X-Plane 9 runs on any iPhone or iPod touch running iPhone 2.0 software or later.
Information from the X-Plane website:
X-Plane for iPhone is a fun little 'slice' of X-Plane that is just the right size to fit on the cool little platform that is the iPhone. We actually managed to get about 95% of the flight-model accuracy, many of the weather, sky conditions, and times of day, the default flight area, and 4 cool planes into this little sim, so you can fly around in the virtual skies when actually stuck back in seat 23-D, wishing you were flying instead!
