Let go of the stick and it flies itself
Last week the mobile autopilot moved into a gesture — double-tap the steering half to latch it. It looked clean and it didn't work. Here's why, and the fix: on a phone the autopilot no longer has a gesture at all. The stick is the switch.
Why the double-tap failed
The idea was tidy: two quick taps on the stick half toggle the straight-and-level hold, same as P on desktop. In practice players reported it simply didn't fire, and the reason was baked into the gesture. To tell a tap apart from a steer, the code required each tap to be nearly still — move the touch more than a fraction of the stick's radius and it counted as flying, not tapping.
But the stick anchors under your thumb, and a thumb jab on a flight stick is never still — the pad rolls, the contact slides a few dozen pixels, and that was already past the threshold. So an honest double-tap read as two tiny steer inputs and quietly did nothing. The gesture was fighting the very control it lived on top of. You can loosen the threshold, but then a frantic dogfight jab starts toggling the autopilot by accident. Overloading the steering thumb was the whole problem.
The stick is the switch
So the toggle went away. A thumb on the stick means you are flying the plane; lifting it means you are not. That is the entire interface. Let go of the stick and, after a short beat with your thumb off it, the autopilot latches — the centre ✈ AUTOPILOT flag lights and the plane holds its heading, straight and level. Touch the stick again and it drops on the same frame; you have the controls back instantly, mid-manoeuvre, no gesture to perform.
It fits how the plane already behaved. Releasing the virtual stick eases the aim back toward level on its own — but only loosely, and a trimmed-out warbird left alone will slowly roll off and wander. The latch is what turns that soft drift into an actual hold: once your thumb has been gone a moment, it captures the heading you were on and keeps it there against gusts and trim, so a stray thumb-lift to work the throttle or swing the camera leaves you flying arrow-straight instead of sagging into a bank.
The two things it won't do
It won't grab the plane the instant you spawn: a fresh cockpit gives you that first beat of manual control before the latch is even armed, so you leave the runway flying it yourself. And it won't hijack a stunt. If you're inverted over the top of a loop or pointed near-vertical when your thumb comes off — the one time auto-levelling would openly fight you — the latch holds its fire and lets you finish the move. Every other attitude, it catches and levels, because a hands-off plane that's rolling off is exactly the plane that wanted catching.
The best mobile control is the one you never learn. No button, no gesture, no tutorial line — just take your thumb off the stick, the way you'd take your hands off a real yoke, and let the aeroplane fly.