After many years of work, the new stable release of the free open-source flight simulator FlightGear is finally here! FlightGear 2024.1.1 now replaces 2020.3 as our supported, stable version.

The 2024.1 release series will only receive relatively minor updates, as development efforts are being focused on the next major release that includes a new rendering pipeline!

As always there’s also internal improvements to the flight models and other simulation systems, bug-fixes, and performance improvements.

To get started straight away, visit the download page.

Feature highlights

There’s been a ton of changes since the last release, but here’s a few particularly interesting ones:

• Real-time dynamic shadows and lights
• Added preliminary support for VR headsets using OpenXR
• Added a preview of World Scenery 3.0, a new scenery system that uses multiple levels of detail to provide higher frame-rates and lower memory occupancy at bigger visibility ranges
• Fixed a large number of crashes, bugs, and memory leaks, as well as a high-severity security vulnerability (CVE-2025-0781).

For the full list of changes, check out the changelog