X-Plane is a popular flight simulator developed by Lominer research.

It features a first principal's physics engine, realistic aircraft systems, and a wide variety of aircraft.

We wanted to understand the engineering that goes into creating a flight simulator, so we invited Ben Supnik on the show.

Ben is a software engineer at Lominer, and he's been working on X-Plane for the

past 20 years. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about X-Plane and his career working on

the simulator. Kevin Ball, or K-Ball, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an

independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders.

He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup,

and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through latent space.

Check out the show notes to follow KBall on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, kball.l. LLC. Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I am so excited to get to dig in. This is an area of

software I haven't touched before, so I'm excited to go. But let's start with you. Can you introduce

yourself a little bit and share about you and X-Plain and what brought you here? I am a software

engineer. I've been working on X-Plane for over two decades, which is like 130 years in software engineering years.

If you told me back in 2005, you'll be doing this in 2025.

I would have been completely surprised.

But I started working on X-Plane back in X-Plane 8.

I was actually planning to get out of software engineering. My plan

was to make a total career change and become an air traffic controller. And I had been an

X-plane user, an enthusiast, a kind of a modder. And I called Austin up and said, you know,

I'm doing this training to become an air traffic controller. I can work part time while I'm doing this. How about one last thing before I go?

I'm going to design a new Siri file format for you and get you some data. And like, that'll be like a sort of

a capstone for all the modding I've done. And 25 years later, here we are. I actually got the air traffic control training. And while I was

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