[captainpeter]

I'm not sure if it was the lightwave importer but technically, Planemaker is metric (internally) so if you position a model 1.0000 'units' off center in AC3D it will appear 1 meter off center in X-Plane. Sometimes conversion between 3d formats will mess things up however and 1 unit in lwo format ends up as 0.1 units in an intermediate format and could well account for a 0.01 scaling when the file finally ends up in ac3d.

In your case the file was scaled up by the conversion process. While perfectly visible in AC3D it exceeded x-plane's (or actually Planemaker's) view dimensions.
Think of it as a drone the size of the Nimitz attached to the flight model of a Piper Cub.
Planemaker uses the underlying acf model to calculate its 3d view bounds and hides any geometry too far out.

peter