So, first of all, in order to fly an air vehicle, you will need to start the engine. This is actually very simple; just press the 'R' key (by default) to start the engine.

Now that you've started the engine, your vehicle will not move very much on its own. You will need to increase throttle. You do this by pressing the space bar (again, by default). In a helicopter, you will begin to hover and fly off the ground. In a plane (such as the Cessna) you will begin to go forwards swiftly. Since you are moving forward quickly, wait a second or two and press the 'W' key. You will have now achieved liftoff!

Alright, so now you're hovering in the air/flying forward through the air. Now what? Aside from not crashing, this is the hard part. In a plane, you use 'A' and 'D' to turn, and 'W' and 'S' to move up and down. You can fly sideways, and in fact I find this to be an easy way to turn. Also, you must keep holding the space bar to maintain airspeed. You also can use Mouse 1 and Mouse 2 to turn midair without flying sideways, but this ability is best used on helicopters. Speaking of which . . .

On to the helicopter flight. WASD controls the tilt of your helicopter, vital for moving. W will move you forward quickly, but you will experience an altitude loss shortly; S will move you backward at a similar speed, but you will experience an altitude gain.
You can predict an altitude change by the 'H' shaped heads-up display in the pilot's seat in a helicopter; if the crosshairs is above the middle line, you will go higher; if it is below this line, you will go lower (but faster).
Like in planes, you can use the left and right mouse buttons to turn your helicopter quickly, but I find this to be more useful in a helicopter like the Mi-28 Havoc, specifically to aid the gunner (more on air vehicle gunnery later).

Whether you're flying a chopper or a plane, you can (hopefully) now enjoy your flight without death rudely interrupting every couple minutes!

So you've been in flight for a while, and want to land. Maybe it's good practice with the Black Hawk or MH-6, maybe you feel like it for the realism. First, planes.
The space bar will decrease your speed midair, and you can pull in for a landing. Warning with the Cessna especially: do NOT pull the Cessna toward the ground too steeply; the propeller will smash off. Which is a bad thing. You can also turn the engine off in-flight. This is probably not a good idea generally, but at low enough altitudes and speeds it could work.

Now how to land a helicopter, a slower task. First, you should really, really activate hover mode. It makes your landing one thousand percent easier. Hover mode, I'm fairly confident to say, must be manually bound to a key; it has no default key. Hover mode can be toggled, however, which is helpful.
Once hover mode is active, the front of your chopper will pull up, then stabilize. You can then pull down with shift gently and land. Landing too quickly will most likely result in damage to your chopper. Well, now you've landed, how about attack helicopters? Read on.

So you know how to fly a helicopter and a plane. You're ready for some fighting, you say? Well, good. It's about time you learned to go to war in these machines. So, I'll be focusing on attack helicopters (in vanilla WAC, the Havoc and the Cobra). I'll also mention a community addon jet fighter and non-jet fighter later on. But let's go. The F key fires, and the G key swaps weapons, by the way, just to clear up any confusion.
The Havoc and the Cobra (and many other addon choppers) are attack choppers. This means that they are armed to defend against enemies on all terrain, including other choppers. The second seat is for a dedicated gunner to control the majority of the helicopter's weapons. The gunner can press the right mouse key to look out the sensor on the bottom of the helicopter. This also gives a black-and white vision that can see through darkness. (Fun fact: this is a simulation of the Forward Looking Infra Red view available to some attack helicopters in real life.)
Attack helicopters generally have all of the following:
Rocket pods, or the pilot can fire rockets. Whether these rockets fire one at a time or two at once depends. In addition, the Havoc has an extremely high number of rockets available: a whopping 40 which fire one at a time. Most choppers have about 14 rockets available.
Autocannon, or the gunner can aim and fire an explosive machine gun by pressing (not holding) Mouse 2 and aiming the crosshair and pressing the fire key. These guns come in two varieties: the slow-firing 24A2, or the fast-firing M197. This is the bread and butter of attack helicopters, and crucial to killing ground targets.
Lock-on missiles, or the gunner can lock onto anything, be it human, Hunter, Strider, Gunship, or other chopper. Due to the propeller being a helicopter's weak spot, these missiles will fly up into the air and then down onto their target's center. In a helicopter, this at least disables it and possibly destroys it. There is a lengthy rearming delay between missiles, though, and only 8 are available if a chopper even has them(some of the WAC community ones don't).
There is another kind of weaponized helicopter, one I refer to as the gunship. This kind of helicopter is armed with weapons only available to the pilot, usually miniguns and occasionally rocket pods. An example of gunship is the AH-6 Little Bird. These helicopters are harder to use to eliminate ground targets, and are best used against attack helicopters currently busy attacking ground troops.

Not all aircraft fire explosive rounds. Here's a list of the ones that do not have explosive rounds(not including unarmed aircraft):

Unofficial WAC:
F-15 Strike Eagle
UH-60L Gunship

WAC Base:
AH-6 Little Bird

Dr. Matt's WAC Community:
A-10A Thunderbolt
AV-14 Hornet
Bell OH-58D Kiowa
Curtiss P-50E Kittyhawk
F-16C Falcon
F-4 Phantom
F-86F Sabre
F/A-18F Super Hornet
Fw 190A-5 Würger
Junkers Ju-87 Stuka
Ka-52 Blackshark, despite using the same autocannon as the Mi-28 Havoc, which does have explosive rounds.
Messerschmitt BF-109E
Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero
P-51D Mustang
Supermarine Spitfire V

There are several useful or interesting aircraft in either WAC Unofficial, Dr. Matt's WAC Community Addons, or the base WAC aircraft itself that defy the norm for their class of aircraft. So let's start with the WAC base aircraft.

MH-6 Little Bird
The MH-6, either deliberately or due to a glitch, currently has no HUD for the pilot, though with experience the HUD almost becomes unnecessary. In addition to this, it can also transport up to four people, including a pilot. Since there are two passenger seats where the miniguns would be on an AH-6, the MH-6 has no weaponry.

Cessna C172
The C172 moves slowly considering its small size. This is because it is not a jet; it is propeller powered, and this is a clear weakness. It can also serve as a low-capacity transport, holding four people including the pilot.

UH-60 Black Hawk
The Black Hawk is one of three unweaponized aircraft in the WAC base. It is a large helicopter, intended for use as a troop transport. It can hold up to seven people at once, including a pilot.

In the Unofficial WAC addons, there are abnormal aircraft. These aircraft that defy their class of aircraft's norm are notable, and should be known of as either threats or advantages.

AV-8B Harrier II
The AV-8B functions as either a jet or as a VTOL, the jet behaving as ordinary and the VTOL behaving like a helicopter, without the weak spot of the blade. The wings on the VTOL Harrier make it slightly harder to fly through narrow spaces, though.

Сухой (Sukhoy) Su-39 Frogfoot
The Frogfoot is the most weaponized jet out of all the WAC fighters, carrying a GSh-30-2 cannon with 250 rounds, 4 regenerating FAB-250 bombs, an insane 64 S-5 rockets, and 4 Kh-23 lock-on missiles. The rocket number alone is noteworthy; this is almost double the capacity of its closest jet rival, the Harrier (38) and 1.6 times its closest helicopter rival, the Mi-28 Havoc (40)

F-15 Strike Eagle
The F-15 carries the most bombs of any aircraft, at 16, quadruple the Frogfoot's capacity. It also has a second seat, which is used to control AIM-7 Sparrow lock-on missiles.

P-59 Airacomet
The Airacomet carries a unique weapon: a semi-automatic cannon, with a small explosive radius but considerable damage, able to neutralize even a hunter with a few hits of splash damage.

UH-1D Huey Gunship
The Huey carries easily the most ammo out of all the gunship helicopters, with 1000 minigun rounds and 400 M60 rounds. It also has 14 rockets.

UH-60L Black Hawk Gunship
The Black Hawk Gunship can bizarrely transport more people (9) than the regular Black Hawk (7) despite common sense dictating that the ammo supply take up a large part of the seating. It clearly pulls bullets from out of the void somehow, or converts energy into matter, thus taking the form of bullets.

And now the final section of the special aircraft, and the largest: The WAC Community addons by Dr. Matt, including the ROFLCopter and the Halo pack.

A-10A Thunderbolt
The Thunderbolt is the largest jet fighter in the game. The C-130 and Mosquito are both actually larger than the Thunderbolt, but those are both propeller-driven, and don't count.

Aircreation 582SL
In addition to being the only WAC ultralight, the 582SL has a propeller at the rear. This can make landing and taking off a pain.

AV-14 Hornet (Halo)
The Hornet actually has two propellers, but neither can be damaged, making this one of the few VTOLs in WAC that aren't helicopters.

BD-5J Micro Jet
This is obviously the smallest jet (but not jet fighter) in the game.

Bell 206B Amphibious
The 206B Amphibious is the only helicopter in WAC (and possibly even all of Gmod) that can land on water. It shouldn't be placed in water, though. It will typically bob, which makes piloting it impossible, so taking off initially from land is the only plausible option.

Bell OD-58D Kiowa
The Kiowa is the only gunship that allows the pilot to see from a camera. This is also the only helicopter to have a camera mounted on top of the propeller.

AH-64D Longbow
The Longbow has no lock-on missiles, so learn to rely on your autocannon.

C-130J Hercules
The Hercules is not only the largest plane by far, it can also carry cargo (even vehicles, up to one of the SCars Abrams) rather than passengers. It can't open the cargo ramp, though.

CH-46 Sea Knight/CH-47 Chinook
Both the Sea Knight and the Chinook have two propellers. The Sea Knight can carry 8 people, while the Chinook can carry 9.

Curtiss JN-4 Jenny
The Jenny is the only WAC biplane.

D77H-TCI Pelican (Halo)
The Pelican is the only vehicle with a cockpit that can be obscured by the air. It's also one of the few non-helicopter VTOLs.

DH.98 Mosquito
The Mosquito is the second largest plane in WAC, and it has a seat dedicated to the one who controls the bombs. Since the plane is a bomber. Also, it carries six bombs.

Ka-50 Blackshark
The Blackshark is the only helicopter to let the pilot control the autocannon (800 rounds), and it's also the only helicopter with two main propellers.

MH-53 Sea Stallion (AKA Pave Low)
The Sea Stallion/Pave Low is easily the largest helicopter out of all the helicopters. It sadly doesn't have any weapons, but the open back of the helicopter allows passengers to fire on ground targets. Not always a good idea, mind you.

Mil Mi-35, NATO reporting name: Hind
The Hind should have something unique, namely carrying 7 more passengers in the back (it can actually do this in real life, even 8). Sadly, it doesn't. It's still unique in appearance, though.

MV-22 Osprey
The Osprey is the second biggest helicopter, and one of four to have twin propellers. It can carry troops and has the fast-firing GAU-17 autocannon mounted on its underside. The gunner can accidentally damage or even destroy the helicopter using its own autocannon if they're being dumb enough.

OH-3G Raven
The Raven is the only ultralight helicopter available. Other than that, it's pretty much a smaller AH-6.

ROFLcopter
Do I even have to explain this? It's a helicopter made out of the word 'rofl', 'lol', 'xD', and 'pizza'. And the seats are two couches. The body of the helicopter was made by taking the kinetic energy put into every keystroke of every 'rofl' across human history up to this point, and the kinetic energy moving through the air as sound from 'rofl' heard across the globe, and concentrating this energy into matter, but just the previously mentioned words. Frankly, it's a miracle it flies. :P

S-64 Skycrane
Ridiculously cool-looking, and even cooler in function, the S-64 can hover above props and actually pick them up and put them other places. Requires a two-man crew in the chopper for best results, and one or two guys on the ground ensuring the claw gets the prop.

UH-144 Falcon (Halo)
The UH-144 Falcon is essentially a minimalist Osprey in green. It can carry five passengers.

Well, that's WAC. That wasn't all the aircraft, but the noteworthy, the cool, and how to fly. I hope you enjoy the guide! I might update this later if more interesting aircraft come out.

Gin453


A thank you from all of my favorite WAC aircraft!

EDIT: Since everyone, and I mean everyone, asks this question: No, you cannot close the cargo ramp on the C-130J Hercules. It's not possible, but it would be nice if it was. This is, I think, my number one most asked question on this guide lately.