Today, Aero Dynamics announced the surprise release of a Northrop T-38 Talon jet trainer for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 in collaboration with Delta Simulations and Infinity.
While Aero Dynamics has its roots in freeware development, the Talon is actually a payware aircraft, available for $29.99 on Infinity’s web store.
The aircraft claims to feature “unprecedented realism and immersion,” and the list of features certainly appears to support that claim.
Here’s what you can expect.
- Realistic Flight Model with supersonic performance
- High-Fidelity Visuals with PBR textures
- Custom Avionics Suite with glass cockpit
- Immersive Sound Design with Wwise audio
- Fully Functional Systems simulation
- Navigation & Training Modes
- 10+ Authentic Liveries
- Electronic Flight Bag (EFB)
- Interactive Pilot Kneeboard
- Commandable Ground Crew
- Custom Effects and wingflex
- Multiple Selectable Configurations
We also get a trailer and a gallery of screenshots, which you can enjoy below.
Simmers who followed the work of Aero Dynamics may wonder what has happened with the freeware McDonnell Douglas DC-10 airliner and its KC-10 military version, and the developer shared on Discord that development on it is now “progressing faster and more consistently” than ever before exactly thanks to the work on the Talon.
The small team used the Talon to refine its development processes, and the DC-10 and KC-10 will still be released as promised with one major change: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 has been dropped, and the aircraft will be exclusive to MSFS 2024.
The developers themselves explained the reason:
“After careful evaluation, continuing active development for the MSFS 2020 platform alongside 2024 would split our very small team’s resources, dramatically slow progress, and ultimately compromise the quality and depth we have promised. The architectural improvements introduced with MSFS 2024 (especially around Sim Attachments, memory handling, and WASM performance) are essential for delivering a genuine study-level three-crew airliner with fully interactive systems, accurate flight dynamics, and the level of detail you expect from us. Focusing on a single, modern platform is the only realistic way we can finish and support the aircraft properly.”
We also hear what the team has learned from developing the Talon, which is being applied to the airliner.
- Deep integration with MSFS 2024 systems and Navigraph navdata
- Scalable LVAR and shared-memory architecture
- Clean, maintainable WASM modules that remain readable at airliner gauge counts
- Physically accurate instrument and gyro modeling
- A complete end-to-end development pipeline that survives multi-year projects
- Robust multi-variant management
- Groundwork for advanced future features on complex airliners
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is available for PC and Xbox Series X|S. It’ll be released for PS5 on December 8, 2025. If you’d like to learn more, you can check out our recent interview with Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann.
If you’d like to read more flight simulation news, you can find plenty in our previous roundup article from yesterday.
If you want to go further back, we have a handy overview video of the major flight simulation news in the past week. You can watch it below. As usual, leaving a like and a comment and subscribing to our growing YouTube channel is extremely helpful.
