YouвЂ™ll probably want to add 2 to the number of sections you had in mind to account for the two closed ends. The number of stations corresponds to the number of individual sections that Plane Maker will link together to form your aircraft body, with a maximum of 20. In the window that appears, weвЂ™ll set the Body Data section first. With the images ready to go, open the Standard menu and click Fuselage. These will be used as background images with which to align our design.ДЇor use with the fuselage creation, crop your top and left images down to just the fuselage, being sure that the images are the same size and are both centered on the fuselage center. We found front, top, and left views of our A36 Bonanza on the Beechcraft website. Unless you have physical access to the aircraft youвЂ™re designing, youвЂ™ll want to find scaled images of the craft to use in the design. If you are not familiar with the basic views and controls in Plane Maker you can review them in the section вЂњ Working with the ViewsвЂќ found in the Plane Maker manual. Position each tankвЂ™s center of gravity using the standard longitudinal-lateral-vertical positioning relative to the reference point. For our example Bonanza, we have two fuel tanks, one in each wing, each holding 0.5 of the total fuel. There are 9 different fuel tanks available, each one holding a ratio of the maximum fuel. Now move to the Tanks tab of this window. The empty weight, fuel load, and maximum weight can all easily be found from the manufacturer. The center of gravity can be modified within these limits in X-Plane.Д«eneath the Center of Gravity box is the Weights box. The center of the longitudinal positions is the default, while the outer two are the forward and aft limits. In the Center of Gravity section of this window you can set three longitudinal positions for the center of gravity, along with one vertical position. Next, open the Standard menu and click Weight & Balance. At G-loads more than 50% above these values, if the appropriate settings are enabled in X-Plane, structural damage will occurвЂ“probably in the form of a wing being torn off! Setting the Weight and Balance If you canвЂ™t find official G-limit values, 4.0 is a good guess for most general aviation aircraft. These limiting velocities are not hard to find, either in the pilotвЂ™s operating handbook or on the Web. With the exception of the G-limits, these will not be factored into the flight model they may, however, be used in the airspeed indicator. The most important settings here are for the aircraftвЂ™s limits (found on the left side of the window in the Default tab). Open the Standard menu and click Viewpoint. WeвЂ™ll begin by setting a few basic parameters for our aircraft in order to the avoid the warning that pops up every time you save.

We will save our example aircraft in the вЂњBonanzaA36вЂќ folder which we created in our X-Plane installation directory, and weвЂ™ll name it вЂњA36.вЂќ Then, open the File menu again and click Save As. This will create a new, very basic aircraft file. When the window appears, open the File menu by mousing over it and click New. To begin creating the aircraft, open the Plane Maker application found in your X-Plane installation directory. A web search should turn up this data for most popular planes. In the course of creating the aircraft file, you will need a good deal of information on the actual plane, including its physical dimensions, engine and propeller specifications, weight, fuel capacity, fuel tank locations, limiting and recommended airspeeds, and so on.

Our example craft is a Beechcraft A36 Bonanza. For the purposes of this tutorial, though, we suggest choosing a straightforward design to model. Plane Maker can be used to model a tremendous variety of aircraft.

5.1 Adding the Control Surfaces to the WingsД¬hoosing an Aircraft, Researching the Design.

4.2 Creating the Horizontal and Vertical Stabilizers.

1 Choosing an Aircraft, Researching the Design.

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