The flight deck crew already wore the right shirts — now they speak the language. The directors on the Enterprise work the standard marshalling vocabulary, wands lit and everything:
The full vocabulary.START ENGINES when a jet comes alive, IDENTIFY GATE (both wands straight up: “I have you”), STRAIGHT AHEAD beckoning, TURN LEFT / TURN RIGHT with the pointing wand genuinely aimed at the side the jet must veer, SLOW DOWN patting low on short final to the spot — then NORMAL STOP with wands crossed overhead, CUT ENGINES across the throat, and CHOCKS held high while the blue shirts duck in.
The wingwalker. A yellow shirt marches the starboard wingtip of every taxiing jet, one wand up the whole way — and stands fast with the wand up whenever the jet brakes. The directors hold a STOP while she’s brake-held, exactly as the book says.
You get marshalled too. Spawn on the deck and it’s start-engines and identify-gate; taxi for the cat and you’re waved forward and slowed onto the track; on the shuttle the wands cross, then chocks until you throttle up and the shooter takes over with the kneel-and-point. Trap back aboard and the recovery director waves you up the deck, slows you, and puts you to bed — stop, cut, chocks.
The two environment toggles on the main menu used to have a third stop — MISSION DEFAULT — which mostly asked the pilot to guess what it meant. No more:
DAY ↔ NIGHT. T is now a straight two-way switch; the row always reads exactly what you'll get: NOW: DAY or NOW: NIGHT.
CLEAR → CLOUDS → RAIN → STORM. R cycles the four weathers and stops nowhere else.
Authored sorties keep their briefing. Untouched, a mission still flies at its authored time — the Bear still comes at night. The moment you flip the switch, your choice becomes an explicit override. The plane-select screen shows the same two-state readout, and saves with an old pick migrate cleanly.
Fuel burn was punishingly high — it's now halved for both jets, roughly doubling your time in the air. And the carrier plane-select no longer offers the F-16: with no tailhook it can't work the boat, so the option is gone (and the dormant hook mesh removed from the model) instead of biting you on launch.
The flight model grew up: bank the wings and lift pulls you around the turn, guns and missiles are free to fire outside missions, and there’s a working ejection seat for when the math stops working.
