Boeing 787-8 Yoke for Infinite Flight

Rotation is the whole point

Every 787-8 departure has one second that matters more than the rest. The jet gathers speed with the quiet, far-off rush only big high-bypass turbofans make, the composite wing flexes upward as it takes the load, and then the call comes: rotate. On a touchscreen, that second is a thumb sliding across glass. With a Boeing 787-8 yoke for Infinite Flight built from the iPhone already in your hand, it becomes the input the airplane was designed around — a smooth, two-handed pull that eases the nose skyward while the Dreamliner's wingtips bow upward and the runway falls away.

SkyYoke is how the phone gets there. It links over your home Wi-Fi to Infinite Flight running on an iPad or another device, discovers the simulator automatically, and streams your motion to the aircraft live. Choose the 787-8 from Infinite Flight's fleet, settle into your seat, and the slab of glass in your palm starts behaving like a control column.

The original Dreamliner

The -8 is where the Dreamliner story begins — the first of the family, and the airplane that proved a composite airframe could carry the long-haul flag. Its real trick was economic as much as structural: big-jet range at mid-size capacity, which let airlines open thin long-haul routes between city pairs that could never fill a jumbo. Passengers remember the huge dimmable windows; pilots got a thoroughly modern flight deck that, unusually for so new a design, kept the traditional Boeing yoke in front of each seat.

That last detail is the soul of this page. The stretched 787-9 and 787-10 inherited the same column, but the -8 is the shortest, lightest member of the family — the one that started it all. If the airplane itself insists on a yoke, flying it in Infinite Flight with one in your hands feels less like a gimmick and more like respect.

Your iPhone as a Boeing 787-8 yoke

SkyYoke's Motion Yoke does not read raw rotation angles; it reads the gravity vector relative to a neutral point you choose. The practical translation: grip does not matter. Rest the phone flat on your lap or hold it upright in both hands like the genuine article — either way, rolling your wrists banks the Dreamliner and pulling the top edge toward you raises the nose. There is no gimbal lock to fight, and a one-tap Recenter captures a fresh neutral whenever you shift in your seat.

A widebody rewards smoothness over twitch, so every axis is tunable to taste:

• Tilt range from 15° to 60°, so full deflection can be a subtle lean or a full arm movement.
• Sensitivity and an expo curve — gentle around center for cruise corrections, full authority at the stops for a gusty flare.
• Dead zone, inversion, trim and smoothing, each set independently for pitch, roll and yaw so the column and the rudder can have different personalities.

Prefer to keep the phone still? The Touch Joystick swaps motion for an on-screen, self-centering pad that maps 1:1 and springs back to neutral the moment you let go. Both modes feed the same 60 Hz control loop with change-detection, rate limiting and automatic reconnection if your Wi-Fi blinks. A self-centering rudder bar along the bottom of the screen handles taxi steering and crosswind work.

One lever from takeoff thrust to a walking pace

The smart throttle is shaped around exactly the rhythm of a 787-8 sector. Advance it for takeoff thrust; a haptic tick marks the idle detent on the way back down. The clever part begins at touchdown: pull the lever into its red zone at 40 knots or above and SkyYoke engages reverse thrust and holds it for you — Infinite Flight normally requires reverse to be held continuously, and the lever takes over that chore so you can watch the centerline instead of your thumb. As the rollout decays below 40 knots, the same red zone becomes proportional wheel braking, so one continuous pull walks the jet from reverse down to taxi speed.

Airborne, the red zone is locked out entirely — a warning banner and a repeating haptic make an accidental in-flight reverse impossible to miss. The lever even recolors by role: blue-green for forward thrust, amber while braking, red in reverse. There is a deeper dive on the remote throttle page.

A flight deck wrapped around the column

Long-haul flying is mostly monitoring, so SkyYoke keeps the monitoring on the same screen as the controls. Live IAS, altitude, heading and vertical-speed chips sit beside PFD-style speed and altitude tapes with cyan bugs marking your selected targets, plus a ground/air phase chip and a spoiler annunciator. The systems panel covers the flows — beacon and strobes, landing lights, cabin signs, autobrake, engine start, APU — and only shows controls the aircraft you are flying actually exposes.

The last one earns its keep on a Dreamliner descent: a slick, heavy widebody gathers speed easily coming downhill, and the Violation Avoidance System arms itself about 2,000 ft above the restriction band, remembers the speed you dialed, and restores it once you are clear. Like the traffic scope and the V-speed callouts, it is a simulator aid — helpful and audible, but an estimate, never a guarantee.

From the gate to airborne in five steps

1. Share a network. Put your iPhone and the device running Infinite Flight on the same Wi-Fi.
2. Enable Infinite Flight Connect. Switch it on in Infinite Flight's settings so the simulator can accept SkyYoke's link.
3. Bind your axes once. Map roll, pitch, throttle and rudder in Infinite Flight's Controllers settings — the in-app setup guide walks through every step.
4. Load the 787-8. Pick the Dreamliner from Infinite Flight's fleet at whatever gate suits the route.
5. Fly. SkyYoke finds the simulator automatically — tilt to bank, pull to rotate, slide the lever to power.

From there the -8 does what it was built for: long, quiet hours westbound with the autopilot panel a thumb-swipe away, then a yoke in your hands again when the destination shows up on the scope.