Why does X-Plane 9 only give me access to one plane?

Question

Hardware: Mac Book Air running OS X 10.11.1

I bought X-Plane online and tried installing it. I kept getting an error saying that the installer couldn't write to folder, blah blah blah, permissions... so I downloaded the DVD installer program from X-Plane and the install seemed to function correctly except, that when I start the game, I only have access to the Demo plane and one airport. I try opening a plane from the Heavy Metal folder, but no joy - same Cessna as before. I am playing with Disk 1 in the drive.

Any ideas? I have deleted the demo folder, and I did run the X-Plane 9 updater on the correct version of X-Plane (as in, the real install, not the demo)

Thanks,

Glyn

Comments

I should have mentioned that I bought x-plane as a DVD set, not software download.

Answer 1

X-Plane 9 requires that the disk (DVD 1) be inserted while using X-Plane. Otherwise, it will limit you to LOWI and the default plane, as you stated.

Comments

Yes, the disk was inserted as I was playing, but still only the one plane.

Answer 2

Please double check that the installer you downloaded from X-Plane.com was from the "older versions" page. Otherwise you might have downloaded X-Plane 10, not 9, and since you have not purchased it it will only have demo mode available.

We recommend that you install X-plane on the desktop to avoid errors with writing permissions. You can try trashing your current installation and re-installing on the desktop.

Comments

I definitely installed x_plane 9. I have the x-plane 9 folder on my desktop, not demo.

Latest is that I can now open other airports, and some other planes, but everything in the Heavy Metal folder seems to be unavailable. Any ideas?