Airbus A350-900 Joystick for Infinite Flight

Built for the longest lines on the map

Lay a ruler across a globe and pick the city pair that looks unflyable — that is A350-900 territory. Airbus's carbon-fiber XWB flagship operates some of the longest routes on Earth, and its ULR variant links Singapore and New York with no stop in between. In Infinite Flight, that pedigree makes it the aircraft you choose when you want a flight that means something, and SkyYoke gives it a proper set of controls: an Airbus A350-900 joystick for Infinite Flight made from the iPhone already in your pocket, talking to the simulator over your own Wi-Fi.

A leg that long is mostly autopilot, which is precisely why the few minutes you do fly by hand carry so much weight. The rotation out of a heavy departure, the last thousand feet of a dawn approach — these moments want fingertip pressure, not thumb swipes on the same pane of glass that is busy rendering the scenery. Holding a separate controller changes how those minutes feel, and on this aircraft the right controller is not a yoke at all.

Carbon fiber, Trent power, six screens

The -900 is the founding member of the XWB family and its flagship: a widebody twin built around composite structure and hauled along by a pair of Rolls-Royce Trent XWB turbofans. Up front, the flight deck is famously serene and ultra-modern, its instruments consolidated onto six large displays — an office designed for crews who measure duty days in double digits.

That calm carries into how the airplane is flown. Like every Airbus of its generation, the A350-900 is commanded from a compact sidestick — small deflections, smooth responses, no control column in sight. Find it in Infinite Flight's fleet and that character is yours to explore; if you would rather go even bigger, the four-engine A380-800 gets the same SkyYoke treatment.

An Airbus A350-900 joystick for Infinite Flight, straight from your pocket

Because the real airplane is a sidestick design, your phone is not a compromise here — it is a scale model of the actual control. SkyYoke offers two interchangeable ways to fly it:

• Motion tilt. The app measures gravity against a neutral point you set, so any grip works — flat on a tray table or held up like a stick — and there is no gimbal lock anywhere in the math. Choose how far you lean for full deflection (15–60°) and recenter with one tap whenever you settle into a new position.
• Touch joystick. A self-centering on-screen pad maps your thumb 1:1 to pitch and roll and snaps back to neutral the moment you release it — handy when the phone is propped on a desk.

Each axis — pitch, roll, yaw and brake — carries its own sensitivity, dead zone, expo curve, inversion, trim and smoothing, so you can give the XWB a soft, damped center for cruise nudges and keep crisp authority at the stops for a gusty flare. A 60 Hz control loop with change-detection and rate limiting keeps inputs immediate without flooding the network, and a link watchdog reconnects automatically if the Wi-Fi hiccups.

Six gates and a haptic click for each

Select any Airbus — the A350-900 included — and SkyYoke's single thrust lever automatically reshapes itself into a gated Airbus quadrant: REV FULL / REV / IDLE / CLIMB / FLX·MCT / TOGA. Every gate crossing lands as a haptic tick in your palm, so you can set a takeoff detent or push through to TOGA entirely by feel, eyes on the runway on your other screen, then come back one gate to CLIMB once you are established in the climb-out.

The bottom of the quadrant is just as considered. Infinite Flight wants reverse thrust held, so on the rollout at 40 knots or faster, pulling into the red zone holds reverse for you; once you slow below 40 knots the same travel becomes proportional wheel braking. Airborne, reverse is simply refused — a warning banner and a repeating haptic make sure you know — and the lever recolors by role: blue and green for forward thrust, amber for braking, red for reverse. The whole system is unpacked on the remote throttle page.

Instruments to match six big displays

An airplane this clean is flown by its numbers, and SkyYoke keeps them in your peripheral vision while both hands stay on the controls: live IAS, altitude, heading and vertical-speed chips, a ground/air phase chip and a spoiler annunciator, with Airbus-style PFD speed and altitude tapes — trend arrow, cyan selected-value bugs — speaking the same visual dialect as the panel in the real jet.

Long descents into busy airspace are where Infinite Flight's overspeed rules catch people out, so the Violation Avoidance System stands watch on airliners like this one: it arms itself roughly 2,000 ft above the 250-knot band and, with the autopilot engaged, either clamps the speed target to 250 knots — remembering what you had dialed — or manages energy by idling the throttle and adjusting the descent until the limit holds. The TCAS scope, the spoken callouts and every V-speed are simulator aids and estimates, never certified avionics, and the protection is an assist rather than a promise.

Wheels-up in five steps

1. Join both devices — the iPhone running SkyYoke and the device running Infinite Flight — to the same Wi-Fi network.
2. Switch on Infinite Flight Connect in the simulator's settings so it will listen for an external controller.
3. Open SkyYoke; it finds the simulator on the network by itself. Bind the control axes once in Infinite Flight's Controllers settings, with the in-app guide showing each step.
4. Pick the A350-900 from Infinite Flight's fleet and file something worthy of it — the XWB is wasted on a traffic pattern.
5. Fly. Tilt or touch for the sidestick, gates for the thrust, the bottom-edge bar for rudder — and let the haptics tell you where the detents are.