NANAWING GUIDES · HOW TO PLAY ▶ Fly now — it's free
Controls guide

How to play Nanawing: keyboard and RC radio, explained properly

Nanawing is a fixed-wing FPV simulator that runs entirely in your browser — nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. This guide covers everything from your first hand-launch to calibrating a real RC transmitter, including the one convention that surprises newcomers: pull back to climb.

The Nanawing controls screen showing the full keyboard reference, axis inversion switches and controller calibration
THE HANGAR ▸ CONTROLS — the in-game reference this guide expands on

Your first flight in sixty seconds

Open sim.narenana.com and the world starts loading behind the menu — real progress, not a fake bar, because the terrain, aircraft and sky are streaming in. The big button unlocks the moment everything is ready. Then:

1

Press START FLYING

Or hit Space / Enter. The menu drops away and you're standing on a dirt strip with your wing.

2

Launch with Space

A launcher jogs down the strip and throws the aircraft for you — flying wings have no landing gear, so every flight starts with a hand-toss at flying speed.

3

Throttle up and climb

Hold ⇧ Shift for power and pull S to raise the nose. Bank with A and D to turn — wings turn by rolling, not yawing.

4

Crashed? R puts you back

Instantly, on the strip, with a fresh battery. Crashing is how everyone learns FPV — the sim exists so the crashes are free.

Every key, and what it actually does

Pitch · S climbs, W divesWS
Roll · bank to turnAD
Throttle · up / downCtrl
Launch · hand-tossSpace
Reset · back to the stripR
Return home · RTH autopilotH
Camera · chase ⇄ FPVC
Aircraft · cycle the three wingsV
Mute engineM
FPS meterP
Menu / pauseEsc
Why does S climb? The RC convention

On every RC transmitter in the world, pulling the pitch stick back raises the nose — the same way a real control column works. Nanawing keeps that convention on the keyboard: S (pulling back) climbs, W (pushing forward) dives. If you'd rather have it the other way, flip Invert pitch under Controls — the setting is keyboard-only and saved on your device, so your radio calibration is never affected.

Flying a wing well: the three habits

Bank, then pull

A flying wing has no rudder. Turns happen by rolling into the direction you want (A/D) and then adding a little back-pressure (S) to carve the turn. Roll without pull and you slide sideways losing altitude; pull without roll and you just climb. The sim models this honestly — it flies coordinated turns the way a real wing does.

Speed is life

Every airframe has a stall speed (27–39 km/h depending on the wing — see the aircraft guide). Get slower than that and the wing stops flying: the nose drops whether you like it or not. Keep some throttle in turns — banking raises the stall speed.

Land into the flare

Cut the throttle on final, glide down, and just before the ground ease the nose up so you touch gently, wings level. The crash report card grades exactly this: sink rate under 1.5 m/s, pitch within 4° of level, bank under 8°. Spear it in nose-first and the card will tell you — in loving mechanical detail — what you broke.

Flying with an RC radio or gamepad

The Nanawing Hangar menu with input selector showing Keyboard, Gamepad and RC radio options
THE HANGAR — the input selector sits beside START; plug in a device and it appears

This is where Nanawing earns the word simulator. Any RC transmitter that presents itself as a USB joystick — EdgeTX and OpenTX radios do this natively, as do most trainer-port dongles — works as a full multi-axis controller, and so does an ordinary gamepad. Plug it in, nudge a stick, and the Hangar's input selector offers it.

Selecting an uncalibrated device opens the 7-step calibration, which takes about a minute:

  1. Centre — pick your device type and stick mode (Modes 1–4 supported), then let go of everything so the sim captures neutral.
  2. Roll — hold the stick fully right. The direction is captured automatically from the deflection, so there is no "reverse" checkbox to get wrong.
  3. Pitch — pull fully back (climb). Again, direction is captured from what you do, not from an assumption.
  4. Throttle — sweep low to high a few times so the sim learns the full range of your throttle travel.
  5. Switches — optionally bind a switch for launch, reset and return-to-home. RC radios expose switches as axes, not buttons — Nanawing handles both, which most browser games get wrong.
  6. Confidence check — move everything; each control lights green when it responds correctly. Nothing saves until this passes you.
  7. Save profile — name it ("Field TX", "Couch Xbox"). Reconnect the same device later and the profile loads automatically.
Keyboard always works

Space, R and H stay live even when a radio is flying the aircraft — so a mis-bound switch never strands you mid-air. And the invert toggles only ever apply to the keyboard: your radio flies exactly as you calibrated it.

Cameras: chase and FPV

C switches between the chase camera — a smoothed third-person view that's the friendliest way to learn — and the FPV camera, the nose-mounted view real pilots fly through goggles, complete with artificial horizon, pitch ladder and the green OSD telemetry (altitude, speed, battery, home arrow). Learn in chase, then graduate to FPV: it's the whole point of the hobby, and the reason this genre is called FPV.

When it goes wrong: reset and return-to-home

R resets to the strip instantly. H engages the return-to-home autopilot: the sim levels the wing, climbs to a safe altitude and flies back toward the strip in a gentle loiter — exactly what the RTH failsafe on a real long-range wing does. It also triggers automatically if your "radio link" drops. Watch it fly for a moment; it's a good demonstration of what coordinated flight looks like.

Racing, without a race menu

There is deliberately no mode select in Nanawing — every launch is free flight. The race lives in the world instead: a green arch floats over the runway, and flying through it starts a lap on the gate course. Finish and you get a time, a medal, and a spot on the global leaderboard. Ignore it entirely and nothing nags you.

Ready? The wing is on the strip.
Loads in seconds, flies offline, free forever. Space to launch.
START FLYING →