Transcription
If you're new to flying in Battlefield, there is a decent chance that the first time you tried to fly, you did know better at the controls than a drunk, nearsighted koala. I myself thought flying would be relatively intuitive. And yeah, about that. I'm— No, no, I'm just crashing. I don't care. Like, that's horrible. That's how planes work. I don't play games like this for realism. It's a video game. Yeah. Turns out it's hard.
But while normal people were out doing fun, regular fall activities, aka getting drunk on hay rides, carving pumpkins, spending time with loved ones, and watching the New York Jets get clapped, I practiced flying a lot. And I'm happy to report that after the initial frustration, I've learned a ton, which I'm now going to share with you amateur flyers today. This will not be just another video of a streamer sharing their in-game sensitivity and saying things like, "These are the best settings. Use these," with zero follow-up explanation on what things actually do, which kind of drives me crazy, by the way. And I will give you my settings at the end of the video if you are curious, but that's not the point. I actually want to explain flying to you and give you specific practice drills to improve. And hopefully, you'll get to the point where you can not only fly in an actual match, but win a couple of dogfights, too.
Let's start with how to practice flying the jet. Go into the community tab in-game and then hit browse servers. You're looking for any server that looks anything like this: Helicopter and Jet Practice. You can also go to search experiences and search for the word "practice," and you'll likely find many lobbies that offer the same thing. Jet practice or practice flying or whatever. These lobbies are a godsend. And I spent many hours in lobbies just like this one, and I hard recommend you do the same.
First things first, let's talk about your controls. I need to mention that I am a mouse and keyboard player, but controller players don't X out of the video. Even though you won't be able to copy my settings at the end of the vid, my goal is still to teach you in a way that you can understand regardless of input method. Before taking off, the big question you'll have to decide for yourself is, do you want to invert your vertical controls or not? For example, I do not like inverted controls. So, when I move my mouse up, my jet goes up, and that is the way I like it. If you prefer inverted, that's fine. It's whatever you're comfortable with.
And with that being said, why don't we go over a basic understanding of flying controls. Throttle up and throttle down basically mean go faster or go slower. But I don't want you to worry too much about speed right now. Your first step, and the only thing you should be worried about right now, is flying without immediately crashing into the ground. Yaw right and yaw left basically mean turn the jet to the right slightly and turn the jet to the left slightly. Check it out in-game. As I hold down the A key with no other input, my jet slowly turns to the left. And if I hold down the D key with no other input, my jet slowly turns to the right. Again, that is yaw left and yaw right.
Now, if you're thinking, "Huh, that's how you turn? Your jet barely moved at all when you yawed to the left or yawed to the right." And you're totally correct. If you truly want to fly your jet to the left or the right, you need to think about it in terms of not only yawing to the left or the right, but rolling, which is basically the real way of turning the jet in any given direction and will be doing most of the heavy lifting when you fly. Again, the in-game settings will say roll left and roll right regardless of your input method. But for me on M&K, I roll to the right by moving my mouse to the right, and I begin to basically spin my jet to the right. Same thing when I move my mouse to the left. I begin to roll my jet to the left.
To learn how to actually make turns in the jet, try doing this. We're not going to yaw at all. I'm going to go to the edge of the map and I'm going to pull up. And then I'm going to roll left. And I'm going to keep pulling up and rolling left until I'm facing the map again, at which point I'm going to now roll the jet back in the other direction to kind of right myself until my wings are once again parallel to the ground.
And with that in mind, practice lesson one. Fly around the entire map without crashing. Go into a jet practice community lobby and without shooting or using weapons or attempting anything fancy, simply fly around the map making big, long turns. Your goal is to get comfortable in the air and to learn how to turn to the left or the right, as well as go up and down without crashing. You can take this time to occasionally go into your settings and fiddle with your in-game flying sensitivity if you want to. Basically, if you think your jet is rolling too slowly or turning too slowly, you can increase the sensitivity, then keep practicing flying to see if the changes are to your liking.
On that note, I should quickly mention what jet to practice with, aka what each jet is designed for. There are two jets in Battlefield 6: the attack jet and the fighter jet. The visual designs will be a little bit different depending on what faction you're currently playing, but the easiest way to distinguish between the two jet icons in-game are the attack jet has one big tail in the back with one engine, so to speak. And the fighter jet has a more split Y-shaped tail in the back and has two engines. The attack jet is intended for engaging with ground units, aka dealing with enemy tanks and infantry. Meanwhile, the fighter jet is intended for engaging with other aircraft, aka enemy helicopters and enemy jets. As you can imagine, the fighter jet is much more nimble and agile in how well it can turn because again, it is designed for dogfighting and engaging with other jets. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you begin practicing with the fighter jet. Again, the one with two engines on the back when you first start to practice. You'll be able to turn and move a little bit easier and maneuver a little bit better right out of the gate. Then later on, when you're much more comfortable with your controls and keeping the jet in the air, then you can practice with the attack jet, which again is a little bit more sluggish.
Okay, now that you've hopefully spent a good time simply learning how to keep the jet up in the air and making gentle turns around the entire map, it is time for practice lesson two: making sharper turns. Most jet practice lobbies I've jumped into have taken place on the Operation Firestorm map. So, here's what I want you to do. Think about the map itself and I want you to draw an imaginary line down the middle of the map, essentially dividing it into two sides: the red side and the blue side. Now, rather than fly around the entire map, I want you to stay on one side of the map. Pick a color. I recommend blue, and fly back and forth across the one side following this path. The goal here is to get you to learn how to make sharper, more controlled turns and make you practice not just flying willy-nilly all over the map, but rather to stay on a strict path. Basically, this would be the car equivalent of, "Hey, drive on this exact path in between some cones." We're trying to narrow down how tightly you can move around.
Here's a tip. When making sharp turns, again, you want to make sure that you're rolling into the direction you want to go while pitching up into the turn. When making turns like this for the first time, I was trying to look for getting my jet into an exact kind of angle with the ground. If we pause right here, you can see way off on the left-hand side of the screen, that is the ground out there. And you can see that my jet in relation to the ground, my wings are basically perpendicular. Then we hit play and pause again here. The more you go into the turn, the more your jet is going to roll over almost to the point of you maybe being upside down, but not quite. Now, hit play one more time. And right there, I finally roll back in the other direction, righting my jet back to normal.
As you get better at doing this, try to get into the habit of when you're rolling the jet back the other way and evening the wings out, try to hold whatever your button is for throttle down, which again, remember, is slowing down the speed of your jet just a little bit towards the final half of the turn. This will take some time, but keep doing it until you can basically patrol one side of the map routinely back and forth without messing up or crossing over to the other side of the map over the invisible line. Again, fiddle with your in-game sensitivity if need be until you're comfortable making these kinds of turns.
All right, practice lesson number three, and maybe my favorite: tail other jets. Hopefully by now you're feeling relatively good at keeping your jet in the air and not hardcore crashing into the ground. Again, if you're in a practice lobby learning to fly, odds are there should be a fair amount of other players in the lobby. When you're up in the air, pick one other player in a jet, either friendly or enemy, doesn't matter. And your job is to just follow them as close as you can and don't let them out of your sight. I'm talking hardcore tailgate that like a bad, angry Massachusetts driver on a rainy Sunday. Get right up behind that guy and keep them in your sight right in front of you 24/7. And if you start off and follow someone who might be too good at flying, then maybe feel free to find a more noobish flyer in the air until you start to get more comfortable.
At first, you can and should practice doing this in third-person mode. After a while, though, I want you to get into the habit of trying to follow and tailgate that other player while in first-person mode in the cockpit, which on keyboard is the C key. If they bank and take a sharp turn, and you find it difficult to keep track of them, feel free to temporarily go back into third-person mode to make relocating them easier. When you found them again, though, I want you to re-engage in first-person mode and follow them in the cockpit vision as much as you can. The goal of doing this is to get you much more comfortable with repeated sharp turns, but also to get you more comfortable with engaging an enemy jet.
As you get better at doing this, try to really make sure that this little circle on your cockpit HUD is right on top of the enemy jet as much as possible. That is because later, when you're in a real actual match and trying to shoot down an enemy player, the little circle indicates where your machine gun bullets are going to go when you pull the trigger. At first, you may find tailgating other jets very hard, even if you were really good at practice lessons one and two. Again, fiddle around with your sensitivity if you need to, but stay with it. If they start to speed up, you speed up. Use the afterburners if you have to, but you want to practice being right on somebody's tail.
By the way, here's a weird way to take slightly sharper turns. I don't recommend doing this a ton. I don't do it a lot in games in the moment, but do take note. If you're in the middle of making a turn and during that turn, you hit the button for the afterburner, which normally will give you a good speed boost and ramp up the engine power, you'll actually sort of stall in midair and lose a bit of speed and elevation, and just for a second or two, you'll start to freefall a little bit. Doing that can be scary, but if you're ever in a situation where you need to take a really sharp turn, it's something that you may want to practice doing. I recommend taking a lot of time to practice lesson three until you feel really confident at following enemy jets around extremely close. I'd also recommend that you get into the habit every now and then of using the free look camera option to look around, especially behind your own jet. This is because when you're in an actual match, the last thing you want to do is get caught off guard and get shot down by an enemy jet that you didn't even know was back there sniffing your tailpipe for the last 5 minutes. The more comfy you get with using the free camera as you get comfortable flying, the better.
When you feel that you've really nailed down the tailgating lesson and you can stay on an enemy jet's backside without them losing you, it is now time for the final lesson. Do it all over again with the attack jet and try to attack imaginary targets on the ground. Again, the attack jet is a little bit more sluggish than the fighter jet, and you want to make sure you get in practice with both. When you get a feel for the attack jet, try to imagine an invisible enemy on the ground and engage with that imaginary target in one of two ways. One, picture a target in a specific location and swoop down firing your machine gun at that imaginary target and then pull up and fly away without crashing. And two, use weapon option four, aka what the game calls the aim-guided missile, which I think is kind of misleading, but whatever. And try to pick a spot on the ground and then try to drop a missile onto that target. When trying to aim that bomb, your crosshair will switch to a large circle hovering beneath your jet. Then, when you hit the fire button, you'll be dropping a bomb that will land wherever that circle currently is on the map in front of you. Getting kills this way in a match is very satisfying. Therefore, practicing and being accurate with your bomb drops is key. Regarding firing down at an imaginary target with your machine gun, this will help you get into the habit of swooping down and shooting both enemy ground vehicles and enemy infantry in real games.
After you've done all of these practice exercises to the point where you really feel good about it, it's finally time to go into a real match of Conquest and practice against real people. I recommend doing a custom search for the Conquest mode featuring the maps Liberation Peak and also Operation Firestorm. Of course, I'm going to be real with you. You may get shot down a lot, and you know what? That's okay. Practicing against real people is very different from goofing around in a private lobby. But now that you know how to stay in the air without crashing, you'll slowly begin to get better and better at dealing with real enemy players. So stick with it.
Before showing you my controls and sensitivity, I want to talk about staying alive and dodging enemy fire. When in a real game, you can and will get locked onto by enemy infantry with ground-to-air rocket launchers. It's imperative that when that happens, you do not panic and you do not activate your flares right away. Wait until you see the text that says "Incoming" flashing on your HUD before hitting the flares. That means that the enemy rocket is actually coming your way. Also, you don't have unlimited flares. So, if you pop your flares and fend off a missile and then get locked onto by another missile, your best hope is to use natural cover to protect your jet. You can do this by trying to fly behind mountain ranges and flying low to the ground when behind mountains. Doing that ain't guaranteed, but it often can result in the missile that was tracking you hitting the mountain that you just flew behind, basically giving you a free get-out-of-jail-free card until your flares recharge.
And remember, if you get hit by an enemy rocket, it does not always guarantee death. Very often, this will happen. Your jet will get sent into a tailspin, but don't rage and bail out of the jet. You can recover. You do this by leaning into the tailspin. Keep manually rolling in the direction that your jet is naturally tail-spinning in. You may need to do two or three full rotations, but after that, you can actually regain control and keep flying. This definitely will take some practice, and that's why it's important to not bail out the second you get hit.
Final random tip: remember, even though the attack jet is designed to attack the ground, and the fighter jet is designed for dogfighting, don't feel you only have to do those things. I've killed enemy infantry with a fighter jet, and I've won dogfights with an attack jet. Anything is possible, baby.
All right, on that note, my in-game settings if you feel like you want to copy them for whatever reason. Remember, I play on mouse and keyboard, and my mouse DPI is set to 800, but honestly, I may need to increase that a little bit when I fly. I'm constantly like moving my mouse up on the mousepad when making turns, but whatever. It works for me.
This was a beginner's guide, but if you'd like me to eventually make a more advanced guide to jet flying in Battlefield, I don't know, let me know. I had a lot of fun practicing and improving in the air, and would welcome another challenge. If today's video helped you in any way, please hit the like button and leave a comment. It is a huge way to support my channel for free. And remember to swing by the Twitch channel if you ever want to chat. Thank you very much for watching. Peace.
[Music]