The one input

Hold — touch, mouse or the space bar — and the nose drops. You lose height and gain speed. Let go and the plane spends that banked speed climbing. There is no steering, no second button, and the game is identical on a phone and a desktop. The whole skill is choosing when to spend.

The office

• Sun shafts and radiators lift you. Ride them when you are low and you keep your speed.
• Air-con vents push down. Cross them fast and high, or not at all.
• Furniture — desks, cabinets, a monstera, a ceiling fan — is what you thread between.
• Friday opens a fifth zone, the stairwell, and adds the crosswinds.

Crumpling

Hitting anything crumples the plane. It costs momentum, not the run: you flutter, then relaunch from the last checkpoint gate with the clock still running. Crashes are expensive, never fatal — except on the Long Haul, where there are no gates at all.

Paperclips

Each one you bank takes half a second off your time. They sit off the racing line on purpose, so the fast route and the greedy route disagree. Your score is the route time minus the clips.

Who else is up there

The translucent planes beside you are real recorded flights, not made-up rivals: your own best, whoever sent you a challenge link, and the office’s median and top-decile runs for today. They are replayed from the same engine you are flying, so they are exactly where they were at the same point on the clock.

The rota

A new route at midnight, UK time. One scored attempt a day; every older route stays flyable from Sent Items, unranked and streak-neutral, so a challenge link never expires. When the window closes, there is always the Long Haul — which does not.