Norway’s southwest coast has become unusually crowded. Stavanger Airport in Sola went years without a dedicated payware scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator, and now two have turned up within about a month of each other. IronSim got there first in early August with its own ENZV. Orbx has since published a second version, built by Norwegian developer Finn Hansen, so simmers who fly the region suddenly have a choice to make.
A developer on a Norway run
For anyone who follows Hansen’s work, this will feel familiar. Back in March he released Oslo Gardermoen through Orbx into a market that already had an established Aerosoft option. He has spent much of the past year on Norwegian ground, from the four regional airports Orbx put out last November, Sandefjord, Notodden, Ålesund Vigra and Molde, through Gardermoen and now Sola. Stavanger is the biggest and busiest name on that list.
Sola is a fair candidate for the attention. It opened in 1937 and is often cited as Norway’s first civilian airport, and today it runs a mix that few fields its size can match. Scheduled domestic services to Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim share the airfield with short haul European flights, cargo, general aviation and one of the busiest offshore helicopter operations in Europe, which ferries crews out to the North Sea rigs. Two intersecting runways and a dedicated helicopter terminal handle all of it, often under the fast changing coastal weather that makes North Sea flying its own kind of challenge.
What the Orbx version includes
Orbx’s rendition is built from the ground up for MSFS and covers both the 2020 and 2024 versions of the sim. The studio lists custom aerial imagery, custom ground polygons and PBR textures at 4K across the airport, along with interior modelling for the terminals and a set of custom ground service equipment statics. Animated jetways, accurate runway and approach lighting and VDGS guidance through the Nool Aerosystems plugin round out the airside detail. Hansen has used that same Nool VDGS system on his recent projects, including Gardermoen, so the docking experience should be consistent for anyone already flying his Norwegian airports.
An official GSX profile by Aanerud ships inside the package for simmers who run GSX ground handling. Performance is a fair thing to watch at a field with this much going on at once, and Orbx says the scenery has been optimised for it.
How it compares to IronSim’s Sola
That brings us back to the question of choice. IronSim’s ENZV, which we covered a few weeks ago, arrived at around €14 and includes terminal interiors, custom jetways and a selection of Stavanger city landmarks. Hansen’s Orbx version comes in a little higher at €16.69, or roughly US$19.43 and £14.30, and skews toward the airport itself rather than the surrounding city. Both cover MSFS 2020 and 2024.
So, do you want the wider city context IronSim includes, or the airport focused package with Nool VDGS that Hansen has built? Price separates them by only a couple of euros, so it may come down to which feature set fits your flying and, for those who already own Hansen’s other Norwegian fields, whether a consistent toolset across the region is worth something to you.
ENZV Stavanger Sola is available now from Orbx for about €16.69, for MSFS 2020 and 2024.
