In other words, the commonly-used “stability derivatives” are over-simplifications of how an airplane flies; in contrast, blade element theory figures out the forces on each little bit of the airplane to model the way it would fly in the real world. Blade element theory is much more robust, and it can give greater accuracy in a much wider variety of flight conditions. Furthermore, stability derivatives cannot predict how an airplane will fly. The aircraft model’s creator has to figure out how the plane will fly and then use the stability derivative to mindlessly spit that performance back out. Only blade element theory can accurately predict what an airplane of a given geometry will do; Microsoft Flight Simulator cannot do this. Instead, whoever designed the airplane has to tell the simulator how the airplane should fly, and the simulator then spits that information back to the user—nobody actually learns anything. With blade element theory, though, as used in X-Plane, you can enter the shape of an airplane and let X-Plane figure out how a plane of that shape, weight, power would fly!