Your keys, your stick
For as long as the game has flown, the keys were ours, not yours. W climbed, A/D rolled, Q/E worked the rudder, and if your hands wanted them anywhere else — a lefty, an AZERTY board, a thumb that lives on the arrows — tough. Now there’s a Settings > Keybindings screen. Bind every desktop flight control to whatever key you like; it saves to your device and takes hold in the air the instant you set it.
Every stick, where you want it
Open Settings > Keybindings and there’s a keycap for every control, grouped Flight / Throttle / Weapons / Systems — nineteen in all, from pitch and roll to guns, bombs, flaps, and every toggle. Whatever your hands want, put it there.
Everything binds to the physical key, not the letter printed on it. A binding you set on a QWERTY board lands on the same key of an AZERTY one, so the layout under your fingers is the one that flies the plane.
Click a cap, press a key
It’s as direct as it sounds: click a cap and it pulses gold — press… — and the next key you hit takes the slot. A control can hold more than one key (the letter and the arrow, both Shifts), so there’s a + to add another and a ↻ to put one back to default. Set it and it takes hold in the air right away — no reload, no reconnect.
One quiet rule keeps it honest: a key can only do one flight job at a time. Bind Space to bombs and it stops firing the guns — the screen takes the key from whoever held it and tells you so (“Space → Drop bomb (taken from Fire guns)”), rather than letting one press quietly do two things. And the keys that stop the page scrolling out from under you mid-dogfight follow your bindings now, so putting throttle on PageUp won’t page you off the plane.
The help never lies, either. The control card on the join screen and the HUD hint bar both show your keys — move pitch to K and the card quietly reads K/S. And the three pilot toggles that used to be blind-press secrets — mouse aim, auto-trim, inverted pitch — now have plain checkboxes on the same screen, so you can find them without knowing the magic letter first.
Naval and land crews keep their own conning keys for now. But if you fly with a keyboard, the sticks are finally where you put them.