The X-Plane Flight Simulator with Ben Supnik

X Plane is a popular flight simulator developed by Laminar Research. It features a first principles 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 Laminar, and he's been working on x plane for the past twenty 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 cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Kay Ball on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, kball.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 Plane and what brought you here? I am a software engineer. I've been working on X Plane for over two decades, which is like one hundred and thirty 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 eight. 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 and 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 gonna 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 twenty five years later, here we are. I actually got the air traffic control training. And while I was waiting for the FAA to call me back, there was just more to do on X plane and more to do on X plane. So I kind of stuck around. I started working on the rendering engine. And by the time the FAA actually called me, we were knee deep in X plane eight and making progress, and I realized I was on this flight sim track. Yeah. I would love to sort of dig in with you a little bit on just even what it looks like to be on a project for twenty years because that's a pretty unusual experience. But let's …