Air Control is a flight sim thing where you experience various jobs in aviation do stuff in a realistic environment hellworld where nothing makes sense. During casual mode and realistic mode, you'll be tasked multiple times with flying an airplane, as one might expect from a game like this unless you've actually looked at gameplay footage on youtube, in which case this might actually come as a surprise.

Much like in real life, flying a plane in Air Control is confusing and terrifying with the constant threat of everything just falling apart for no reason. You may get frustrated with trying to get from point A to point B, but it's actually pretty easy if you know how to do it. Which the game doesn't actually tell you. Luckily, you have me.

With the instructions given to you, taking off may seem easy at first. Just hold spacebar to start the engine, and then hold the S key to tilt the plane back and up into the sky. As you attempt this, you will soon find everything going horribly wrong, as you desperately hit all the WASD keys to try and level it out until you end up motionless on your back with a dead engine.

The trick to taking off is to not start from the ground, but from up in the sky. The controls on screen say that holding Y will raise your plane up in the air, which works, but it's being pulled up by the nose of the plane and not straight up. By the time you get any sort of altitude, you'll end up backflipping, hitting the ground and killing the engine again.

The secret is the O key. Pressing O will teleport your plane straight up and reset its orientation so you're pointing slightly up. To do a clean takeoff, press O two or three times to reach a decent altitude and then hold spacebar to turn on the engines, and you should be good to go.

Once you're in the air, it's mostly smooth sailing. Keep holding the spacebar to keep your engines going. You could also hit the 1 through 0 keys to set a constant speed from slowest to fastest, but I think holding spacebar is actually slightly faster than the fastest cruising speed. The plane is never going to really fly very straight, so you'll need to keep an eye on it by feathering the WASD buttons as needed, with W pitching down and S pitching up. As terrible as those controls are for taking off, they sort of work in the air as long as you don't go too crazy with them.

If you do manage to lose control and crash, your engines will die when you hit the ground and won't start up again, even if your plane is upright. You can fix this by hitting the O key like you did for takeoff; it not only lifts you back up and reorientes you, but it will also reset your engines back to working condition.

Keep an eye on your distance to the goal on screen to make sure you're heading in the right general direction and not moving further away. The place you want to land is always* a large green cube. I use "land" loosely, as all you actually have to do is have the plane fly into the cube somehow. These can be kind of hard to reach, since they might end up a little bit off to the side of your current path. And like I said, while the WASD controls are fine if you just use them lightly, it all falls apart when you try to make any major turns.

So let's say you're going in for a landing and you crash, missing the cube. You could hit O to launch back up in the air and try to fly back around, or you can use the other hidden control option. Using IJKL the same way you'd use WASD will let you move the plane around (even backwards) without having to use the engine. It's fast, possibly faster than using your engines, and can help you reach the landing zone if it's nearby. You can use those controls at any time, even while you have the engine engaged, but it can send you hurtling forwards or backwards way faster than you had intended. It's best used when you're just lying there on the ground in view of the landing zone and you don't really care that much anymore.

* Except for the final flight mission of Realistic Mode, "Catastrophe", where you only need to crash the plane into the water.

Congratulations, you now know how to fly a plane in Air Control, and by proxy, real life. Use your new powers responsibly.