A pilot reported the trap: mid-mission you hit Q to call up the main menu — and there was no way back. The menu slammed down over the cockpit and the only way out was to abandon the sortie and relaunch. The sortie itself was never the problem — your jet waits exactly where you left it while the attract demo borrows the camera — the menu just never offered the way back.
Now it does, two ways. Quit to the menu with Q and you’ll find a new top entry: Q — RESUME FLIGHT, tagged BACK IN THE COCKPIT. Hit Q again (or click it) and the menu folds away mid-frame, mission intact, hands back on the stick. The flag clears the moment you launch a fresh sortie, so there’s no ghost resume waiting after you’ve moved on. The subtle part of the fix: the resume key is polled in the frame loop rather than fired from the key event itself — otherwise the same keypress gets seen by both states and bounces you straight back out to the menu. Fifty-one checks green, and the Bay forgives an accidental Q.
A five-line punch list from the cockpit, worked line by line. First, the roads: by day they were rendering in a loud yellow — fine for a centreline at midnight, wrong for asphalt under the California sun. Road ribbons are now dark asphalt gray with muted gray edge lines and centre dashes, still dimming with the sun at dusk, and from altitude they read as proper highways again instead of glowing spaghetti. The menu footer grew too: the HornetBay YouTube channel and a contact address (maverick@hornetbay.com) now sit alongside the journal and X links.
The nastiest item was a trap waiting after mission success: bag the cruise missile bound for Moffett, read the MISSION SUCCESS debrief, close it — and the main menu slammed down over the world with no way back to your jet. The debrief simply never handed control back to the sim. Now it does: a RESUME FLIGHT button (or Enter, Space or Escape) folds the debrief away and drops you straight back into free flight over the world you just saved; MAIN MENU remains if you’re done for the day. Chasing this one exposed a sneakier accomplice — the service worker’s cache could pin an old build, so fixes weren’t always reaching installed copies. The worker now revalidates with the server on every load: what ships is what you fly.
And maritime law is now enforced: every ship, boat and pleasure craft stays in the blue water, never on the green. The traffic routes had been plotted against the wrong chart datum — the sea surface sits a touch below the terrain’s zero mark, so two legs that looked wet on paper actually clipped a drying shoreline and parked sailboats on the Sausalito shallows. Every route was re-plotted against the game’s own ground truth with the corrected waterline and a wide safety margin, then swept waypoint by waypoint. Twelve hulls, all wet, all day and night.
