The X-Plane Flight Simulator with Ben Supnik

Podcast Tuesday, October 28 2025

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

Kevin Ball or KBall, 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.

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