Pull back to climb
Every pilot who has ever held a stick knows the reflex: haul it into your lap and the nose swings up toward the sky. Our mouse did the opposite — shove it away from you to climb — and the muscle memory fought it every sortie. So we flipped the elevator. Pull the mouse back and down, and the plane pulls up. It’s the shipped default now; one checkbox puts the old arcade feel back.
The feeling, in the pilot’s words
“I keep flying into the ground when I try to climb.” It reads like a skill problem until you watch the hands: anyone who has ever held a stick pulls toward themselves to bring the nose up — and Warbirds used to raise the nose when you pushed the mouse forward. Half the muscle memory in the world was wired the other way, and the game was quietly punishing it every sortie.
Pull back, climb
Now the yoke does what your hands expect. Pull the mouse back and down and the aim point rises; the plane climbs to meet it. Shove it forward and the nose drops. It matches the keys too — S and Down pull the nose up right alongside a mouse pull-back, so there's one consistent up-is-back feel however you fly. The precision naval and turret gunsights, where up-is-up is sacred for laying a shot, are left exactly as they were.
It's the reflex you already have. Roll into a screaming dive, haul back, and the nose sweeps up through the horizon and keeps climbing — hold it a few seconds and a plane that was pointed at the dirt is pointed at the sky, no thinking required. That's the whole point: your hands already knew how to do this.
Prefer the old push-forward-to-climb feel? Settings has a checkbox — Inverted elevator — and the I key toggles it mid-flight. Your choice sticks to your device. But out of the box, the yoke finally works the way your hands expect.