"Over the years Meyer has tinkered relentlessly with the program, producing some 140 new versions. His obsessiveness has kept him competitive. While several rival sims have withered in Microsoft's shade -- including Pro Pilot, Flight Unlimited and Fly -- Meyer has kept plugging along. But there are disadvantages to being a one-man show. It's hard to imagine Microsoft coming home drunk one night from a party and accidentally uploading its entire source code, as Meyer did a few years back. "I woke up the next morning and found an e-mail from a friend alerting me to what I'd done. My heart stopped. I had basically given away 12 years of work. I thought my life was over." He was able to remove the files before anyone could spread them around, but to this day he feels like he dodged a bullet. "I don't drink anymore," he says."
This guy is incredible. I worked on some UAV/UGV systems at my uni and heard of quite a few teams using X-Plane as a simulation environment for their UAVs. As stated in the article the simulator actually tries to model what's happening with the aircraft instead of using look-up tables based on full size aircraft, making it much more useful for modeling model... (small scale) aircraft.
