Pull back to climb
Every pilot who has ever held a stick knows the reflex: haul it into your lap and the nose swings up toward the sky. Our mouse did the opposite — shove it away from you to climb — and the muscle memory fought it every sortie. So we flipped the elevator. Pull the mouse back and down, and the plane pulls up. It’s the shipped default now; one checkbox puts the old arcade feel back.
The feeling, in the pilot’s words
“I keep flying into the ground when I try to climb.” It reads like a skill problem until you watch the hands: a stick-trained pilot pulls toward themselves to bring the nose up, and our reticle rose when you pushed the mouse forward. Half the muscle memory in the world is wired the other way, and the reticle was quietly punishing it.
The fix is a single sign
The mouse-aim reticle is accumulated from raw pointer motion — every frame we add the mouse’s travel to a floating aim point, and the plane chases it. The whole reversal lives in the vertical step:
this.cursor.y += (this.invertPitch ? 1 : -1) * e.movementY * sens;
Flip the sign, not the reticle after the fact — so the reticle, the plane, and the steer target never disagree for a single frame. Pull the mouse toward you (the cursor sliding down the screen) and the aim point rises; the plane climbs to meet it. The pitch keys already had an invert; now they share the one flag, so S/Down and a mouse pull-back agree. The precision naval and turret sights, where up-is-up is sacred for laying a gun, are deliberately left alone.
The numbers that proved it
A headless Chromium joined a real air server, forced the pointer-lock aim path, and pulled the mouse 120 px straight back. With the new default on, the reticle rose to +0.264; with it off, the same motion sank it to −0.264 — a clean mirror. Then we held the pull-back for six seconds against a plane that spawned in an 11° dive: the nose came up through the horizon to +7.8°, the climb command settled at a steady +0.58, and the altitude trace bottomed out (541→418→415→421 m) and turned back toward the sky. Pull back, climb — exactly the reflex.
The confession
The first instinct was to leave the reticle where the mouse was and just negate the plane’s pitch command downstream. It would have flown right and looked insane — the crosshair diving while the aircraft soared, the two arguing on every frame. Steering toward a reticle only works if the reticle is honest. Inverting at the source, where the aim point is born, was the only version where the thing you see and the thing the plane does are the same thing.
Prefer the old push-forward-to-climb feel? Settings has a checkbox — Inverted elevator — and the I key toggles it mid-flight. Your choice sticks to your device. But out of the box, the yoke finally works the way your hands expect.