Controls — Stick, Rudder, Throttle

You choose where the rudder lives, from three layouts. How bank and rudder share one axis when they do, how fuel and external tanks work, and why the controls go dead at low speed.

A few things about the controls here are easy to miss — you can play all the way through without ever noticing them. The rudder is the big one: most players never find out it is a separate control at all.

The stick — pitch and bank

Vertical on the stick is pitch; horizontal is bank.

Bank is a rate command. Hold it over and the jet keeps rolling (up to 180°/s, with no bank angle limit); let go and it stops at whatever attitude it reached. Nothing rolls you back to level on its own. Inverted flight works the same way.

The rudder — you choose where it lives

Rudder is a flat turn (±1°/s). It is a very slow heading change, standing in for the real jet’s side-force limit, and it is not how you turn.

From v1.2 you choose where that rudder sits, from three layouts: two pedals above the stick (the default), two pedals beside the throttle, or sharing the stick’s lateral axis as it did in v1.1. The game asks once on your first sortie; after that it is under Settings › Controls.

Only on the shared layout does the horizontal axis do double duty. A drag that starts near the centre of the pad is bank; a touch that starts inside the green band is rudder. Only the position where the touch began counts, so a drag that starts in the centre stays bank even as your finger slides outward. The band itself can be set to Wide, Medium or Narrow.

When to reach for the rudder — and which layout to pick

Use it when you are too slow to bank and just need to nudge the nose over a little. The last corrections on a carrier approach, and lining yourself up in formation, are the typical cases. It is not a substitute for banking into a turn.
Which layout suits you is covered in Rudder Placement — Choosing One of Three Layouts.

Pitch — pulling is down

Up and down on the stick is pitch. Pulling down raises the nose, the same convention as a real control stick.

There is no auto-level, so pitch attitude is always yours to manage.

Throttle and afterburner

The throttle bar sets thrust. There is a detent at the top of the bar, and that is AB (afterburner).

Lighting it has a fixed procedure.

Push the knob all the way into the detent at the top
Hold it there at full for one second

That lights the burner and thrust goes to 1.7×. But —

Back off at all and it goes straight out

Relighting costs another full second at the detent. You cannot ease off and bring it back when you want it again. Once you have decided to use AB for a stretch, leave it in.

There is no time limit on AB. It costs you fuel instead.

Fuel and external tanks

Fuel is both a quantity and a weight. Burn it and the aircraft gets lighter, and the stall speed creeps down with it (see The F-2 §4).

Throttle position sets the flow directly.

Setting	Flow
Idle	0.12 kg/s
Military, full	1.38 kg/s
Afterburner	7.0 kg/s

AB burns about five times what military does. As endurance at sea level, wide open:

	Military	AB
Internal fuel only 2,312 kg	≈28 min	≈5 min 30 s
With two tanks 4,552 kg	≈55 min	≈11 min

Thinner air up high reduces the flow too, so in practice it lasts longer than this. Even so, hold AB in for a whole five-minute mission and the fuel runs out first.

The HUD reads remaining fuel in kg — a vertical gauge beside the throttle on Windows, the FUEL line under the speed bar on iOS.
Below 15% of the internal fuel you launched with, BINGO lights amber. That is the cue to think about getting home. Fuel still in the external tanks does not count toward it.
Run dry and the engine flames out — thrust goes to zero. It is not an instant mission failure: the glide carries on as normal, so if you can put it down from there, put it down.

The tanks can go — keyboard J / pad dpad ←

On the stages that carry external tanks (the Matsushima circuits and the formation missions) you can jettison them in flight. 2,420 kg leaves at once: the stall drops from 262 to 240 km/h and thrust-to-weight gains a fifth. They will not release on the ground. It is not a toggle — pressing again does nothing, and a RETRY puts them back.

The gauge empties the external tanks first. That is why the Windows gauge is split into two bands: the upper one (the tanks) drains first, so you can read off at a glance whether you still have something left to drop.

Control authority scales with speed

If it feels like the jet ignores you at low speed, it does — control authority scales with dynamic pressure.

authority = (speed[km/h] / 396)²

Halve your speed and you have a quarter of the authority. On top of that, control response has a time constant of 0.3 seconds.

What that means is that at low speed your inputs are weak and late at the same time. Grabbing at the controls once you are already close to a stall does not work — not because of your hands, but because of this. Keeping your speed up is the only way to keep the jet controllable.

Landing gear

The behavior changes with grade.

Grade	Gear
NORMAL / HARD	Automatic (down below 342 km/h, up above 396 km/h)
ACE / FREE PLAY	Manual (GEAR button)

On manual, touching down with the gear up is a belly landing and scores as a CRASH. The cycle takes about 2.5 seconds, so remembering on short final is already too late.

Manual gear also brings its parasite drag with it, so dropping it early costs you speed.

Gamepad bindings

If you are playing with a controller:

Control	Binding
Bank / pitch	Left stick
Yaw (rudder)	Right stick, left/right
Throttle	Right stick, up/down
Look around	R1 + right stick
Zoom	Left stick up/down (while holding R1)
Reset view	R3
Jettison tanks	dpad ← (J on the keyboard)

What to remember

Sideways is decided by where the touch starts. Center = bank, outside = rudder.
Bank keeps rolling while you hold it, and stops where you let go.
AB is one second at the detent. Back off at all and it goes out.
AB burns fuel five times as fast. There is no time limit on it, but internal fuel alone lasts 5½ minutes.
Control authority goes as the square of speed. Slow enough and your inputs never arrive.
ACE gear is manual. Forget it and you land on the belly.

Next, what these controls will actually do to a mission — The first five minutes — seven ways a mission fails.