Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 gives a boost to aviation’s hottest new sport, STOL

At least one new single-engine airplane launching with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will be “completely customizable.” That’s according to Brandon Jaeger from Got Friends, one of several third-party developers working alongside Xbox Game Studios and Asobo Studio to bring the marquee product to market on Nov. 19. But the complex feature is about more than just snazzy paint jobs. Instead, the intent is to support one of aviation’s fastest-growing sports: competitive short takeoff and landing, also known as STOL.

Tom Wolf is the co-founder of National STOL, the largest organization currently running STOL competitions here in the United States. He said that STOL skills originated at the dawn of aviation, with barnstorming pilots using improvised airfields all around the country to introduce air travel to the nation. Later, those same skills would be adopted by the military, which must often operate large, fast aircraft from short runways, civilian highways, or even in rough, unfinished terrain. Today, STOL skills are used to bring people and supplies into remote areas of the wilderness all over the world for hunting, fishing, hiking, and skiing, among other pursuits.

“It’s really big in Alaska, it’s really big in places like Idaho, Colorado — places where you need to fly in somewhere because there’s no roads,” Wolf said in a recent interview with Polygon. He explained how what began as landings of necessity quickly became a competitive pastime, with the first informal STOL competitions kicking off in the 1970s. National STOL, spun up in 2020, is just the natural extension of that. Today dozens of amateur and professional pilots participate in National STOL competitions all around the country, with 10 qualifying matches leading to the 2024 finals this year in Sulphur Springs, Texas, on Nov. 2.

But STOL competitions don’t just happen in the real world, Wolf explained. They happen in Microsoft Flight Simulator as well through a parallel competitive series called National eSTOL.

“Everything that we do in our real-life [events], we’ve modeled the scenery into Microsoft Flight Simulator,” Wolf said. “So if you pull up to our event in real life in Texas, or pull up to an event somewhere in Moses Lake, Washington, that scenery, that airport looks exactly the same, like it does in Microsoft Flight Simulator when you come to one of our events there.”

With the launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the planes will begin to look the same as well — including some of the wild modifications that real-world pilots will often make to their aircraft to increase STOL performance. Take, for instance, something as seemingly trivial as the metal cowling around a plane’s engine.

“Taking your cowling off is amazing for cooling [the engine],” Wolf said. “The cost of it [is lowering your overall] cruise speed. There’s a cowling on there because it makes you go faster. You take that off, you’re going to go slower. But it increases your cooling, which means you can push your engine harder. It also saves weight, and the less weight means you take off shorter or land shorter.”

These are precisely the kinds of trade-offs that real-world competitors must make before racing at National STOL events. Now virtual pilots will be able to make some of those same game-day decisions. For his part, Wolf hopes the addition of these kinds of customization options in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 pays dividends by creating more interest in aviation generally, but also in its digital aspects.

“At 12, I started doing flight lessons,” Wolf said. “Because of Flight Simulator, I would go about a month or two months between lessons. My flight instructor looked at me and goes, ‘Why are you so good? How are you maintaining this level of consistency between lessons?’ And I’d say, ‘Look, I’m doing it in Flight Simulator.’ But he wouldn’t believe me because he was a middle-aged guy and wasn’t [into computers].”

Now, Wolf said, he has middle-aged real-world pilots that are suddenly interested in computer-based simulation, all because they can practice the skills they need to succeed in regular STOL by participating in eSTOL.

“We’ve had people from eSTOL come to our real-world events [to volunteer],” Wolf said. “We’ve had the opposite happen [as well]. People came out, sat down at our computers, and they used the Tobii eye-tracking equipment […] and they’re like, ‘This is really fun. I’ve never done this before, and I want to compete with you guys more!’ And they’re doing more eSTOL stuff because of that.

“It’s really like a never-ending machine where it just feeds itself constantly,” he added.

If you’d like to get involved in National eSTOL, Wolf recommends that you drop by the official Discord for more information.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is scheduled to be released Nov. 19 on Windows PC and Xbox Series X.

Disclosure: This article is based on a Microsoft Flight Simulator Global Preview Event held at the Grand Canyon on Sept. 10. Xbox Game Studios provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.