BZA A wing owns two things: height and speed, and every manoeuvre is a trade between them. That is the whole game. What makes it a game rather than a physics exercise is that the air is not the same everywhere — the sky over a ploughed field at noon is not the sky over a forest at night.
- Leaves the ground
- 60 km/h
- Wing starts lifting
- 42 km/h
- Stall
- 36 km/h
- Never exceed
- 170 km/h
- Ceiling
- 100 m above ground
- Free landing under
- 6 m/s down
Getting off the ground
Three ways in, and they differ only in where the speed comes from. After that they are identical.
| Way | What you need | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Under its own engine | Generator, spark plug, petrol, four wheels | About 100 m of reasonably flat, reasonably straight ground. A road or an airstrip is ideal; a long field will do. |
| Down a slope | Four wheels. No engine at all. | Roughly a 15% slope, just over 100 m of it, to reach flying speed. Chernarus has hundreds. Too short a slope gives you a hop and a hard landing. |
| Off a car roof | A car, a pipe wrench, ideally a friend | Any straight stretch of road. The cheapest launch in the mod — see the car launch. |
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Point it at open ground and start rolling
Steering on the ground is A and D, and it is deliberately weak — weaker still the faster you go. SPACE is the brake. Line the machine up before you build speed, because you will not be able to correct much afterwards.
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Feel it go light at 42
From about 42 km/h the wing is already carrying part of the weight. The machine goes light on its wheels and the steering gets vague. That is not a fault, that is the take-off starting.
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At 60, pull back and hold it
Hold S. Speed alone will not do it — the machine leaves the ground when it is fast and the pilot asks. Once it is up, a run-up is worth a climb: the first seconds after release give you about 25 m of free height, fading out.
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Cut the motor
It does nothing in the air except make noise and weigh 45 kg. From here the air is what flies you.
The controls
| Key | In the air | On the ground |
|---|---|---|
| S | Nose up. Climbs, and spends speed doing it. | Asks for take-off, from 60 km/h up. |
| W | Nose down. Buys speed with height, quickly. | — |
| A / D | Bank left and right. The wing holds the angle you put it in — it does not spring back to level. | Steers the nosewheel. Weak, and weaker with speed. |
| SPACE | Releases the machine from a car roof — and in flight, held down, it is a brake in the air as well: it spends speed, and speed is what is holding you up. Worth it to come down over the field you meant to land in, expensive anywhere else. It needs the motor off, which is how you fly anyway. | Brake, engine running or not. |
| Q / E | Nothing. There is no gear in the air. | Shift: reverse, neutral, drive. The letter shows in the vehicle panel and the lever moves on the console beside the ignition. Only below walking pace — the drive is a belt. |
| Nothing at all | Holds its height. Let go of the stick and the machine flies level in any air except red — red brings you down whatever you do. | — |
Roll holds where you put it. This catches everybody once: you bank into a turn, let go, and the machine keeps turning, because that is what a wing left in a bank does. Level it with the opposite key.
The three boards
Printed tin, no batteries, no HUD. Everything you fly by is in front of your face and nothing about it is on the screen.
Left — altitude and airspeed
- The column is height above the ground, not above sea level: ten rungs of 10 m, so a full column is the 100 m ceiling. Height over the hill you are crossing is the number that matters when the hill is what you might hit.
- The bar and the number are airspeed, printed 0 / 60 / 120 / 170. Airspeed, not ground speed — with real wind blowing, those are two very different numbers, and only one of them can stall you.
Middle — the wind profile
Five rows, one for every 20 m of sky above you, up to 100 m. Each row is coloured with the air you would find if you climbed there — it is a forecast of the column you are sitting under, and it is the same air the physics will give you when you arrive.
| Colour | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Strong lift | Climb into it. This is how a flight gets long. |
| Blue | Lift | Worth having, and worth staying in. |
| Pink | Still air | Nothing gained, nothing lost. Hands off and you hold height. |
| Red | Sink | Leave. This is the one air that brings you down with your hands off the controls. |
| Dark red | The pit | Leave faster. |
Right — tilt and attitude
An artificial horizon with the numbers beside it: how many degrees nose up or nose down, how many degrees of bank, and which way. The box that is lit is the direction — there is no minus sign to read. The card is printed to 30° of pitch and 60° of roll, which is further than the wing can actually be flown, on purpose: the moment you are past the limit is the moment you want the instrument to still say something.
Where the lift is
The sky is not a dice roll that follows you around. It is a property of where you are, and flying somewhere else really does change it.
Real wind
The server's own weather, 4–14 m/s in ordinary conditions and up to 20 in a storm. The wing sits inside it, so the wind carries you: slow and steady into it, fast and drifting with it.
Thermals
Each patch of sky carries its own column of five flows, and each flow lives one to three minutes before it is replaced. Fly to another patch and you get another column — which is why searching works.
What is underneath you
Ground makes thermals. Rock and bare earth are the best, grass is ordinary, forest is weak and water gives nothing at all. At night the whole map goes nearly dead.
Ridge lift
Wind hitting a slope has to go up it. That is the most reliable lift in the game and it does not run out after three minutes — find a windward hillside and work along it.
| Under you | Thermals |
|---|---|
| Rock, stone, concrete | Best |
| Bare earth, ploughed fields | Very good |
| Grass | Ordinary |
| Forest | Weak — about a third of grass |
| Water | Nothing |
| Any of it, at night | About a fifth of the daytime figure |
Staying up
- Hands off is level flight. In anything but red air the machine holds its height on its own, so the default state of a flight is not "sinking". You spend the controls to gain, not to survive.
- Cruise speed comes from the air you are in. Hands off in still air settles around 68 km/h; in blue air it holds about 102, and in green about 136. The strong air is what buys the speed.
- Nose down buys speed with height; nose up buys height with speed. There is one currency and that trade is the whole game.
- Turn towards the wing that lifts. When a thermal takes one side of the wing, the machine rolls towards its core. Follow the roll rather than correcting it, hold about 25–35° of bank, and you are circling in the lift instead of flying out of it.
- Lift you have flown through is stored. Time in rising air fills a reservoir worth up to 60 m of climb, which leaks away over about half a minute. Pull back and it spends itself as a hard climb; push forward and it spends itself as speed. A pilot who gathers and spends beats a pilot who gathers and waits.
- The ceiling is 100 m above the ground. That is a limit on climbing, not on where you can be — fly over a valley and the ground drops away underneath you.
Landing
Arriving is where a flight is judged. The only thing measured is how fast you were going downwards when you touched.
| Rate of descent at touchdown | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Under 6 m/s | Nothing at all |
| 6 to 16 m/s | Damage in proportion, up to 45 health off the airframe |
| Over 16 m/s | The full 45 |
Land into wind. It is not folklore here — the wind is real, so flying into it cuts your speed over the ground and softens the touch. Turning into wind before the final approach is the single cheapest thing you can do for the airframe.
Hitting something is a different matter. A landing only ever measures how fast you were going down. An impact measures the forward speed the world takes off you — a hillside, a tree, a wall, or the ground at a shallow angle. Lose more than 3 m/s of it in the moment of the collision and it starts to cost; lose 20 and it costs everything: up to 120 health off the airframe, and up to 140 shock and 90 health off you. Enough to knock you out cold in a field with a wreck for company.
Repairs. A Blowtorch with gas welds the airframe back up, one health level per pass. Nothing else in the game repairs it — a car repair kit will not touch it. See keeping it alive.
What can go wrong
- Stall — below 36 km/h of airspeed. The nose drops and you lose height until it flies again. Full back stick alone will not stall you; there is deliberate margin between the end of the control and the stall.
- Overspeed — past 170 km/h. The sail starts coming apart. The white mark at the end of the airspeed scale is that limit: if the bar is near the top, pull out of the dive.
- Everyone can see you. A glider at 100 m is visible from a very long way off, and it is the one thing on this map that cannot hide behind a treeline.
- You cannot shoot from it, and you cannot land on a roof.
- If the pilot dies in the air, the machine puts its nose down. Wings level, straight into the ground — it does not circle and it does not glide on. On the ground it simply drops into neutral. A passenger cannot take over: there is one set of controls and it is in the front seat.