A new pilot's first week checklist
Fourteen things rated pilots wish someone had told them before wheels-up. Print it, bookmark it, or tattoo it on your throttle thumb.
Every pilot's first week follows the same arc: confidence, catastrophe, a support ticket, then actual competence. This checklist exists to skip the middle two steps. It was written by polling our rated pilots on the mistakes they still see in replays.
Days one and two: the boring stuff that saves you
Do the tutorial twice. Not once. The second pass teaches the emergency drills that the first pass glosses, and emergencies are where new pilots die.
Then fly the training range for an hour with weapons safed. The goal is holding a stable hover inside a fifty-metre box for thirty seconds. It sounds trivial. It isn't, and it is the foundation every other skill sits on.
Days three and four: first combat
Take Recruit difficulty on Dustoff Dawn and fly it until the warnings stop appearing. Then do Kandahar Gap. The first real convoy teaches target prioritisation better than any guide.
Learn the countermeasure rhythm now, not later: pairs of flares on a one-second cadence, then break, then reassess. Button-holding is a habit that takes months to unlearn.
The pilots who improve fastest are the ones who die the most interesting deaths and then watch the replay.
Days five to seven: find your settings
Try all three control schemes for at least two sorties each. The virtual stick wins for most pilots long-term, but the tilt gyro has a cult following for a reason.
Set your assist slider to about 60% and leave it there for a month. Lower is for pilots who've already failed enough. Then join a squadron. Squadmates shorten every learning curve in the game.
What to buy, and what to skip
Skip every purchase in week one. The game gives you everything needed to learn. When you hit the wall around op-05, the Flight School Pro course is the correct next step, not a cosmetics crate.
The one exception is if you know you'll fly weekly: Squadron Elite pays for itself in XP weekends within a month. Everything else can wait until you know what kind of pilot you're becoming.
Give each a fair trial, then commit to whichever your hands prefer. Virtual stick is the ceiling; tilt gyro has the fastest floor. There is no wrong answer, only an uncommitted one.
Only if you fly daily. The pass rewards volume, so an occasional pilot gets less value than a daily one. Membership is the better casual buy.
The recruitment board in the main menu lists open squadrons by activity level and timezone. Beginner-friendly ones mark themselves clearly; don't join a top-100 squadron as your first.
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