You have to manually save them yourself through the build mode.
One thing I was dismayed to learn is that downloaded planes aren’t automatically saved to your computer. There are replicas of planes from wars, fandom vehicles, and even Donald Trump’s plane, a rough approximation of a Boeing 757-200. The community is impressively active, churning out over 100,000 custom aircraft and uploading them to the SimplePlanes website. Luckily, besides just the preloaded models, there are tons of planes available for download. Even when I tried to modify the few premade planes in the game, they fell apart before ever getting off the ground.
Like I mentioned, I don’t know how to build a plane from scratch. I wonder if it’s just as showy on the inside. Between practice and revisiting the written explanation, I have yet to master it. One notable omission is a training mode for turning your plane. There are also playable tutorials for taking off and landing before you’re asked to complete your first solo flight. Though they delve into the science of it all, everything has been written in relatively simple terms with minimal jargon. The first tab contains lengthy tutorials the creators wrote up about different aspects of making and flying planes. There are several tabs that greet you when you load SimplePlanes. Some things worked, while others were less than satisfactory.
They decided to take things up a notch with their next simulation game, moving into the realm of 3D graphics and community integration. The studio’s first game, SimpleRockets, is a 2D space simulation game. However, for the most part I can say that SimplePlanes is a decent game for beginners and experts alike. Even the one physics class I took in high school turned into gibberish in my brain. As someone who studied the humanities in college, let me just say that I know virtually nothing about engineering or building flyable planes.