Qorl was a male human who served the Second Imperium, a breakaway group from the Galactic Empire, as a TIE Fighter pilot. Stationed aboard the first Death Star, he was shot down during the Battle of Yavin. After crash-landing on Yavin 4, he repaired his fighter and joined a minor battle the following day. He encountered Luke Skywalker in the skies above Yavin and attempted to shoot him down, but Luke damaged his ship, causing Qorl to crash again. Following a brief fight with the Rebel on the ground, Qorl passed out but was spared.
He scraped by in the jungle until he met the Solo children and other Jedi trainees 23 years later. After successfully escaping the moon, he reconnected with the Second Imperium splinter group, training their pilots and leading an attack on the jungle moon.
Qorl was shot down a second time and returned to the jungle, where he lived undisturbed until the Yuuzhan Vong War brought him into contact with a Solo once more, this time Anakin. Together, they escaped the moon.
Qorl, designated CE3K-1977, was a TIE Fighter pilot in the Imperial forces assigned to the first Death Star. During the Battle of Yavin, Qorl flew with his squadron against the Rebel forces. Qorl told Jacen and Jaina Solo in 23 ABY that all TIE squadrons on the Death Star were deployed during the battle. This statement contrasts with evidence from Wedge Antilles and others, which suggests that only Darth Vader's elite escort unit, Black Squadron, saw action during the battle. Considering all the evidence, it's likely that Qorl was a pilot from Black Squadron.
X-wing defensive fire severely damaged one of the solar panels on Qorl's TIE Fighter, causing it to spin out of control. Qorl discovered that his fighter's orbit was decaying, sending it spinning towards Yavin 4. His controllers instructed him to make an emergency landing on Yavin and await rescue. Qorl managed a controlled crash that ejected him from his fighter, leaving him with broken bones in his left arm.
Shortly after his crash-landing, Qorl witnessed the Death Star explode in the sky, which was the last he would see of the Imperial forces for over twenty years.
However, Qorl managed to repair his fighter and flew out of the jungle the day after the Battle of Yavin. He spotted a Rebel X-wing and attacked it. After a brief firefight, both Qorl's TIE fighter and the X-wing were badly damaged after the X-wing pilot cut into Qorl's ship. Both ships crashed into the swamp, but their pilots survived. Qorl attacked the Rebel with a blaster but was defeated in a brawl and lost his weapon. Refusing to surrender, Qorl pushed his enemy into a swamp, where the fight continued. Because Qorl was wearing his flight suit, which allowed him to breathe underwater, he gained the upper hand. But when the Rebel ripped out his air hose, Qorl began to drown in his helmet and lost consciousness. However, the Rebel rescued him and left him alive. Qorl didn't know that the Rebel was Luke Skywalker, the man who destroyed the Death Star.
Despite his injuries, Qorl survived in the moon's jungles, following his last orders to stay near the crash and await rescue.
In 23 ABY, the Jedi trainees Lowbacca, Tenel Ka, Jacen Solo, and Jaina Solo discovered Qorl's downed TIE Fighter. Jaina eagerly took the opportunity to dabble in mechanics and, with her friends' help, began repairing the damaged starfighter and fitting it with an old hyperdrive. The hyperdrive unit, a gift from Han Solo from an old Imperial Delta-class shuttle being dismantled on Coruscant, was not initially functional. The young Jedi were unaware that the TIE's pilot had survived, but when Qorl found the Solo twins working on his craft, he saw a chance to escape. He decided to wait for them to finish the repairs while monitoring their progress.
The repairs were nearly complete when Jacen, scavenging for wreckage in the jungle around the crash site, stumbled upon the hollowed-out tree that had been Qorl's home for the past 20 years. The old pilot responded by kidnapping Jacen and Jaina at blaster-point and trying to kill Lowbacca and Tenel Ka as they fled.
Qorl forced his prisoners to finish repairing his fighter. In the meantime, he learned from them about the events of the past twenty-three years, including the downfall of the Empire at Endor and the fact that, despite the peace between the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire, some loyal holdouts remained in the Deep Core.
When the repairs were complete, Qorl tried to destroy the Great Temple, but he failed because Jaina hadn't connected the laser cannons, although she did rig the readouts to make the weapons systems appear normal. Completely defenseless, he managed to escape the weapons fire and break free from the tractor beam of the Millennium Falcon, earning Han's grudging admiration for his piloting skills. Engaging the hyperdrive shortly after leaving the atmosphere, he left the Yavin system for the Deep Core and found the Shadow Academy, run by the Dark Jedi Brakiss. Qorl reported his encounter with the Solo twins. Brakiss inferred that Luke Skywalker was training a new generation of Jedi who could be more easily indoctrinated into the dark side of the Force than the adults he had trained during his brief stay at the Jedi Praxeum.
After joining the Second Imperium, Qorl's injured left arm was replaced with a bulky droid arm from the shoulder down. He liked the new arm because it gave him more strength. He later embarked on his first mission for the Second Imperium, piloting the assault shuttle that was crucial to the success of the raid on GemDiver Station.
Qorl had serious reservations about Brakiss and his assistant instructor Tamith Kai using lethal methods to determine which trainees were worth training. However, he considered himself just a pilot and felt that no one listened to him. He believed that serving his Empire was the right thing to do. Nevertheless, these doubts led him to help the Solo twins and Lowbacca escape from the Shadow Academy. In the end, he reasoned that the new students were more trouble than they were worth. If Brakiss and Tamith Kai knew of his role in the young Jedi's escape, they didn't reveal it.
During the Shadow Academy's operations in the Coruscant system, Qorl commanded a raid on the New Republic bulk cruiser Adamant. The operation was flawless, with minimal casualties inflicted on the stormtrooper squad Qorl commanded.
During the raid, Qorl fought Admiral Gial Ackbar, knocking him unconscious with his prosthetic arm. Despite his victory, Qorl couldn't bring himself to kill unconscious enemies, so he had the Adamant's bridge crew put into an escape pod. The Adamant jumped into hyperspace and docked with the Shadow Academy, where the weapons and equipment were unloaded to build the Second Imperium's fleet.
Qorl's time with the Second Imperium ended dramatically when he was shot down over Yavin 4 during a battle. He witnessed the ramshackle state of the Second Imperium's stolen and incomplete ships, which were poor imitations of the Empire he had proudly served in his youth; this was not the Empire he had hoped to return to. From the moon, he saw the Shadow Academy explode behind him. Once again presumed dead by the Second Imperium, and with his damaged droid arm nearly useless, he reflected on his life. He realized that he had actually liked his years of simple, solitary existence and was now content to live out his life in quiet solitude. The Solo twins and Luke Skywalker learned of the harmless hermit's whereabouts. Nevertheless, they allowed him to live peacefully in the forests of Yavin. The pilot Peckhum occasionally provided Qorl with essential supplies, but in 24 ABY, Qorl thanked Peckhum for his services and asked him not to return.
However, Qorl's path remained intertwined with the Solo children. In 26 ABY, during the Yuuzhan Vong War, the Peace Brigade discovered the location of Skywalker's Jedi Praxeum and attacked the Jedi training site, hoping to collect the galaxy-wide bounty on Jedi offered by Tsavong Lah. After the initial attack by the Peace Brigadiers, Anakin Solo escaped the training grounds in a stolen freighter with Valin Horn, Sannah, and the hostage Brigadier pilot Remis Vehn. The freighter crashed deeper into the jungle, and Anakin began a salvage mission to repair the ship so they could flee the planet.
The next morning, Anakin was awakened by a disheveled old man who introduced himself as Qorl. Anakin immediately recognized the old Imperial pilot from stories his older siblings had told him. Anakin quickly took to Qorl and put him in charge of watching Vehn and coordinating the repair of the freighter, while Anakin set out to rescue Tahiri Veila from her captivity by the Yuuzhan Vong on the moon. Qorl and Remis quickly became friends.
After Anakin rescued Tahiri, Qorl evacuated them from the Shapers' base in the repaired Peace Brigade frigate. Despite the perilous flight away from Yavin, the group managed to escape the Yuuzhan Vong forces on the moon.
Qorl was created by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta. The Official Star Wars Fact File later retconned that he was the Imperial pilot who appeared earlier in The Day after the Death Star!.