See it before you fly it

October 2, 2026 · feature

A hangar card used to be a name and five stat bars. You had to take off to find out what a Fw 190 actually looks like, and a locked livery was a padlock on a coloured chip. Now the machine you're about to crew is right there on the card, turning on the hangar floor, and it tries on any paint you point at.

The hangar card for the Bf 109 G with the paint shop open beneath it: the pointer rests on a locked swatch, and the fighter in the card wears that livery, a black-spinnered grey 109 with a black chevron on its flank and a yellow rudder, captioned GALLAND'S SPECIAL — 0/100 AIR KILLS; in the sky beside the card the same 109 chases a smoking Spitfire — A hundred air kills is a long way off. Now you can see exactly what they buy.

The machine on the card

Walk the hangar carousel and the top of every card is now a pool of hangar light with the machine standing in it, turning slowly so you see it from every side. It's the airplane you'll fly, in the paint it will wear: the Spitfire's dark green swirls, the Mustang's bare metal, the Avenger's Navy blue. The props tick over while you decide.

The same goes for every arm of the service. BOMBER CREW shows you the bomber whose guns you'll be manning. AAA puts the Flak 88 in its sandbagged pit on the turntable, and the NAVY tab shows the twin Bofors tub and Big J herself. On the Brick Steppe the Abrams, the Bradley, the Sd.Kfz. 7/1 and the MUTT each turn on their own card, and on the Brick Sea the whole fleet comes round broadside, from the Fletcher to the Yamato.

Locked machines get the full treatment too. The F-104 at the end of the line, the Yamato at seventy-five ships sunk: you get to look them over properly before you start earning them.

Try on the paint

Open 🎨 PAINT and sweep across the swatches. The airplane in the card wears each one as you pass over it, and the caption in the corner names it. If you haven't earned it yet, the caption says what it takes: GALLAND'S SPECIAL — 37/100 AIR KILLS. Move off the swatches and the airplane goes back to the paint you've got equipped. On a phone, tap a locked swatch to try it on.

So the chips that used to be a padlock and a colour are now the real paint jobs. You'll see the Green Heart under the 109's windscreen, the codes down 616 Squadron's flanks, the skull and crossbones on Kepford's Corsair. Each one sits on the airframe it belongs to before you fly a single sortie toward it.

The caption also tells you how many more paints the airframe on the card can wear. Tap it and the paint shop opens.

On a phone

Hold your phone sideways and the turntable stands beside the stat bars instead of on top of them, so the whole card still fits on one screen under the TAKE OFF button.