Grand Theft Auto and the Simplicity of Flying

In this article, I'll show the GTA Community my opinion about the Aircraft controls of GTA V.

I started GTA V a few years ago, and the first time I used aicraft, it was honestly garbage. Couldn't roll safely and couldn't even make a turn to get behind an enemy aircraft. I realised pretty quickly, that controlling the aircraft with mouse is nearly impossible. I just found out that there's a "Keypad" control. Keypad was a pretty good tool, atleast and upgrade to the basic controls, but I really wanted to make the aircraft as controlable as possible with a single hand. I tried to make a really comfortable setup to perfectly improve my performance in aircrafts. 

Just to say; The current controls of Grand Theft Auto 5 are... pretty unique. These controls are something you have never seen in any games (Atleast not in the more popular games). Many of my friends who flew in GTA, said that the controls are horrible. That's true, but there's something they always forget! You can change the controls! That is infact true, the mouse control is totally broken. But after years of continously flying, I started to feel myself comfortable even with the most sensitive controls of the Aircraft. 

Mastering the aircraft controls takes time!

The first thing I wanted to achieve is to be able to use the mouse to look around while also controlling the aircraft, which requires another hand to use. Whilst dog-fighting, it's recommended to lock on your target with the came, and always keep looking at what's your target doing. With keypad, it's impossible. So I made a setup, which is alot easier and comfortable. I took examples from other games' flight controls. Most of the flight games have one common thing, that is the simplicity of controls.



So how did I manage to achieve that?


First of all; What's your most used part of your keyboard? I'm pretty sure it's the place where WSAD keys are located.
So you probably want to assign the flight keys around that place.

These are the basic keys I personally use:

Controls:
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Manouvering:
Q - E - Yaw
A - D - Roll
W - S - Pitch
Space - Boost
Left mouse click - (You can enable mouse steering in the Settings) While holding this key, it switches to the mouse control. Mostly used on "Pitch + Yaw" setting
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Engine:
Shift - Throttle up
Ctrl - Throttle down
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AddOns:
"Weaponry was the only differend thing, but it was mostly located on mouse. Those keys you see above are my personally used keys."

Right click - Using to fire the choosen weapons
Tab - Switching between weapons
H - Uses the "special" ability by holding it. Pressing it can activate the stealth mode of a specific aircraft.
G - Landing Gears, Pressing and holding it can switch to the hover mode of a specific aircraft.
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Keep in mind, that assigning some keys might require other keys to be allocated elsewhere.



How long does it last to master the flying?

It honestly depends on you and your knowledge on flight physics. I might also recommend to try different games that involve flying. Just to name a few; War Thunder, Simple Planes, Unturned. Such are a great way to teach yourself for the controlls of a virtual aircraft.
The only reason I did not mention flight simulators is because they are way too advanced for such controls, as the games above use an Arcade-ish keyset.

For me, personally; I took a few days to get used to the controls. But mastering the controls is the most basic thing you can do as different planes have different ways of steering. Therefore I also recommend using different aircraft all the time.




Well, this articles was a bit shorter than the usual, but I hope I could help out, 'least a little bit. ;)

-Thank you for reading!