So what did Meyer do next? What any young, genius flying fanatic would do: he used his Mac to develop a more realistic flight sim on his own.

Now in his early 30s, and after many years of round-the-clock hard work and countless lines of code, Meyer and his flight simulator, X-Plane, compete nose-to-nose with Microsoft’s venerable flight sim franchise — even though X-Plane’s 100,000 units sold compared with Microsoft’s 10 million is sort of like watching a Gulfstream taking off next to a 747.

Ready for takeoff. Learn to lift off, fly, and land the behemoth Boeing 747 — one of more than 40 aircraft simulated by X-Plane.

But as everybody knows, the biggest isn’t always the best, nor is it always the nimblest, either. There’s a key difference between these sims, with X-Plane earning industry and consumer accolades (”a hardcore sim for hardcore sim pilots”) and Meyer gaining the respect of aerospace professionals everywhere, many of whom use X-Plane for lots more than just a casual diversion.

A Virtual Wind Tunnel

The difference is in X-Plane’s foundation: an analytical concept known as blade element theory. Simply stated, it predicts how an aircraft flies by summing up the forces on each of its parts as it travels at a given air speed and direction. This means that X-Plane works like a virtual wind tunnel, giving would-be pilots the most realistic flying experience possible — next to actually taking off into the wild blue yonder.

“X-Plane is so accurate that some entrepreneurs use it to test-fly their prototype aircraft.”

Achieving the ultimate in realism, however, requires a lot of fuel in the form of caffeine and midnight oil. Meyer meticulously codes the dimensions and physical properties of each aircraft into X-Plane to glean the forces needed for blade element theory calculations. Because it’s so labor-intensive, most X-Plane competitors don’t bother with blade element theory at all, even though it would provide greater realism. Instead, they typically use a less complicated model called the stability derivative approach. This results in a sim that’s good enough, but not quite real enough for Meyer. “What you say is, for each amount that you deflect the nose up or down, it tries to return to neutral with [this amount of] force,” he explains. “It’s a perfectly linear relationship, but it’s not always that accurate because airplanes aren’t always going to give you a perfectly linear, predictable response.”

Your Own Private Fleet. X-Plane gives you about 40 aircraft to fly, and you can download others from community sites.

A Focus on the Flight Model

With blade element theory, he adds, “You get maybe 20 percent more results from maybe a thousand percent more work. [But] most people are out to make quick money with minimal investment. I mean, they definitely focus on the scenery and not the flight model. And with me, it’s the other way around. Other people have used blade element theory in industry and research,” he says, “but certainly no one else has done it for personal computers, Macintosh or Windows.”

So what, exactly, feels more authentic with X-Plane? “It’s the way the airplanes interact with the air,” Meyer says, “how they handle at different speeds, the way they take off, climb, descend, turn, and maneuver. It’s the way the controls feel kind of sloppy and loose at low speed, but the plane gets tight and responsive as you speed up. The way you can slip the airplane sideways and increase the drag, and then kind of settle down more quickly. The way when you lower the nose, you build up speed and increase your ability to maneuver.”

Good Old Practice

X-Plane is so accurate that some entrepreneurs use it to test-fly their prototype aircraft. One such company is Carter Aviation Technologies, developer of the CarterCopter, a new generation of personal rotor craft. When founder Jay Carter first contacted Meyer, he’d already test-flown his prototype a few times.

But X-Plane allowed Carter and his pilots to log hours and hours on the CarterCopter without ever leaving the hangar.

“When you have a fairly complex prototype, it only takes one fuel pump malfunctioning to scrub an entire day’s mission,” says Meyer. “It’s hard to test fly when you have four or five hundred systems that all have to work right. So the simulator frees them from all that. They just fire up their Mac and test-fly all day long, and don’t have those technical headaches you have with real airplanes. It’s just good old practice.”

“X-Plane works like a virtual wind tunnel, giving would-be pilots the most realistic flying experience possible.”

NASA includes X-Plane in an educational simulator called “Mission to Malls,” that they install in shopping centers and airports. It lets anyone fly the space shuttle, including landing it by hand — something even the astronauts don’t normally do. NASA is also using X-Plane’s built-in Mars simulator to help them design conceptual aircraft for future Red Planet exploration.

Happy Landings. A CarterCopter test pilot brings the autogiro in for a three-pointer.

Even the FAA has given X-Plane its stamp of approval. About four years ago, they approved it for use in professional full-motion flight simulators used to train real pilots for instrument rating and Airline Transport Pilot certification — the only consumer application ever to be granted this status.

Austin’s Powers

Fully confident he’ll never run out of new ideas or improvements, Meyer regularly updates X-Plane with new features, each roll-out described in his contagiously enthusiastic writing style. It’s as if he’s always saying, “You think that was cool? Wait ‘til you see this.”

Straighten Up and Fly Right. Austin Meyer in the cockpit of his latest nuts-and-bolts vehicle: a really cool sporty Cirrus SR-22.

And though he works long hours (a typical day is noon to 4 a.m.), Meyer credits his Mac-based development platform with helping him work more efficiently. “I use OS X, which is just about as close to crash-proof as I can imagine, and basically the nicest interface I can imagine,” he says. “That’s the environment you want to use to develop anything. I use Metrowerks Code Warrior. It’s pretty lean, clean and mean, pretty fast; not a whole lot of extra overhead.”

”Code Warrior on the Macintosh G5, with OS X to me is...well, it’s the best development environment I’ve ever had. Certainly, every generation of Mac has been as twice as fast since the generation before — Moore’s law holds perfectly well,” he adds. “But I always want more speed, obviously. Because the more speed I have, the more stuff I can do. And there are things I am just dying to do.”

If you liked this game, check out:

• Enemy Engaged
• F/A-18: OIF
• WarBirds III