Boeing 787-9 Yoke for Infinite Flight

Watch the wing, then take the column

Every 787-9 departure has the same tell. Halfway down the runway the long composite wing starts carrying the airplane before the wheels admit it — the raked tips rise, the span bows into its signature arc, and rotation follows almost gently for something this size. Infinite Flight renders that moment beautifully; what a touchscreen cannot give you is your part in it. A Boeing 787-9 yoke for Infinite Flight puts your hands back into the maneuver. With SkyYoke, the iPhone between your palms becomes the Dreamliner's control column: roll your wrists and the -9 rolls with you, ease the phone back at VR and that stretched fuselage rotates exactly as deliberately as you ask it to.

Stretched is the operative word. The -9 carries more airplane behind the main gear than the original Dreamliner did, and good 787 pilots rotate it with patience rather than a snatch. Fine, measured pitch input is precisely what a thumb on glass is worst at — and precisely what a motion yoke exists to restore.

Why dozens of airlines made it the default

Of the three Dreamliners, the -9 is the one the order books kept rewarding. It stretches the original -8 while flying farther on its fuel, and that combination — more cabin, longer legs, better economics — is the exact arithmetic that opens long, thin routes a bigger jet could never justify. The result is the modern long-haul default: dozens of operators, from ANA to United to Air New Zealand, reach for a 787-9 when a city pair needs a widebody that earns its keep.

Under that flexing wing sit two large turbofans — General Electric GEnx or Rolls-Royce Trent 1000, depending on the customer — pushing a carbon-fiber airframe shaped around efficiency. And up front, despite a flight deck that is fly-by-wire from nose to tail, Boeing kept the control column. The 787-9 is flown with a yoke in both hands, which makes it a natural partner for a controller you also hold in both hands. The same approach carries straight over to its shorter sibling, the original 787-8, and to the even longer 787-10.

A Boeing 787-9 yoke for Infinite Flight, conjured from gravity

SkyYoke's Motion Yoke does not care how you sit. Instead of reading raw rotation angles, it measures the gravity vector against a neutral you choose — so the phone behaves identically flat on a lap, propped on a tray table or held upright like the column itself, and it can never wander into gimbal lock. You decide how much lean equals full deflection, anywhere from a relaxed 60° to a razor-quick 15°, and a one-tap Recenter captures a fresh neutral the instant you shift in your seat.

Each axis then passes through its own conditioning chain, so the -9 can feel like the stately widebody it is:

• Sensitivity — scale how much bank and pitch a given lean commands; a long-hauler rewards low gain.
• Dead zone — a calm center for the cruise, rescaled so full travel still reaches the stops.
• Expo curve — soft around neutral, with full authority saved for the flare.
• Inversion and trim — flip any axis to taste, then trim the climb attitude away.
• Smoothing — a low-pass filter that strips hand tremor without blunting intent.

Prefer zero motion? The Touch Joystick swaps tilt for an on-screen, self-centering pad: 1:1 response that springs back to center the instant your thumb lifts. Both controls draw the roll and pitch you are commanding live on the screen, and both pair with the self-centering rudder bar along the bottom edge for crosswind corrections and taxi steering.

From takeoff thrust to the 40-knot handoff

A long-haul departure begins heavy and the rollout at the far end arrives fast, so the throttle has real work at both ends of the flight. SkyYoke gives the 787-9 a single smart lever — the same one behind the remote throttle. Slide it forward for 0–100% thrust, with a haptic tick marking the idle detent so your thumb finds it without looking, and watch the lever recolor by role: blue and green for forward thrust, amber for braking, red for reverse. Peripheral vision alone tells you what your hand is commanding.

Touchdown is where the lever earns its name. Pull through idle into the red zone at 40 knots or faster and the app engages held reverse thrust — Infinite Flight insists that reverse be held continuously, so SkyYoke holds it for you while you keep the big twin tracking the centerline. As the rollout decays below 40 knots, that same red travel hands off to proportional wheel braking, walking you down to taxi speed in one motion. Try the red zone in flight and nothing moves: in-air reverse is locked out by design, announced with a warning banner and a repeating haptic.

The 787-9 at a glance

Aids that earn their seat on a long sector

Hand-flying is the headline, but a widebody departure is briefed, not improvised. Open the Performance screen before you taxi and SkyYoke reads your weights live from the simulator, lets you run what-if loadouts against an MTOW bar, pulls headwind and crosswind components from in-sim weather for your chosen runway, and estimates V1, VR, V2, VREF and VAPP from its built-in aircraft profiles — scaled by weight and density altitude, with a runway-length adequacy check on top.

In the cruise, the HUD keeps IAS, altitude, heading and vertical speed in live chips while PFD-style tapes add a speed-trend arrow and cyan bugs at your selected values. The systems panel walks the flows a widebody deserves — battery, APU, engine start, exterior lights, autobrake, cabin signs — and hides any switch the current aircraft does not expose. And on descent into a busy hub, the Violation Avoidance System and the TCAS traffic scope are already watching the band before you reach it.

Your first 787-9 leg in five steps

1. Join the same Wi-Fi. Your iPhone runs SkyYoke; a second device — typically an iPad — runs Infinite Flight.
2. Enable Infinite Flight Connect. Switch it on in Infinite Flight's settings and SkyYoke discovers the simulator on the network by itself.
3. Bind the axes once. Map roll, pitch, throttle and yaw in Infinite Flight's Controllers settings; the in-app setup guide covers every tap.
4. Load the 787-9. Pick it from Infinite Flight's fleet and give it a sector worthy of those long legs.
5. Fly. Recenter at the hold-short line, stand the thrust up, and ease the phone back when you hear "Rotate."