Skip to main content
The Autohover system allows the pilot to lock the helicopter into a stable, stationary hover at the press of a button.
Autohover is not the Autopilot. Autohover (X) holds you still where you are; the Autopilot (P, new in v0.4.2) flies you to a destination you pick on a map. They are independent systems — engaging one never silently flips the other — and they meet only at the hand-off: the autopilot ends its flight by putting the aircraft into an Autohover hold.

​
Activating Autohover

Press X while seated in the pilot seat. What happens:
  1. The helicopter smoothly decelerates from its current speed
  2. It transitions into a locked hover
  3. Once stable, it holds altitude, heading, and XY position
Engagement is a ramp, not a switch — the hold takes about 0.83 seconds to reach full authority and lets go over about 0.4 seconds when you turn it off, so it never snatches the aircraft out from under you. Its authority also scales with rotor speed: nothing below roughly 50% rotor, full authority by roughly 70%. The HUD displays Autohover status so the crew can see whether it is active.
Only the pilot seat can toggle Autohover (on DayZ 1.29 only the pilot seat flies). Engaging is refused — with the HUD icon staying red — when it can’t genuinely hold: on the ground with the engine off, with the rotor stopped, or while inverted. Airborne engine-off engage still works, so you can practice autorotation against it.

​
Flying While Engaged

Autohover is a hold you can fly against, not a lock that has to be switched off first:
  • Steering does not disengage it. Cyclic input temporarily fades the hold’s arrest authority — the aircraft re-arrests where you release, so you can reposition without ever touching X
  • While engaged the cyclic is softened to about 55% of its normal authority, and attitude is hard-limited to 40° of pitch and roll (raised from 25° in v0.4.0) — deliberate aerobatics need the hold off
  • The collective still works. Climb or descend normally with the collective and the hold simply re-latches the new altitude the moment you release it
This is the whole point of the design: engage it over your LZ, nudge yourself into position, ride the collective down, and never fight a toggle while you are doing it.

​
Disengaging Autohover

Press X again — Autohover releases over about 0.4 seconds and returns full control to the pilot. If an autopilot flight is active, switching Autohover off cancels that too — everything drops to full manual in one press. Control input does not switch it off. Beyond the X toggle, the hold is only released by the aircraft itself, when:
  • the helicopter lands with the engine off
  • the engine is cut in flight
  • the main or tail rotor is destroyed
  • the helicopter is destroyed
  • a new pilot enters the seat (the hold is force-released for the incoming pilot)
  • a control swap is aborted, or the aircraft is repositioned by a mid-air restart

​
Automatic Autohover Engagement

Autohover engages automatically if the pilot voluntarily exits the helicopter while airborne, and (since v0.2.9) when the pilot uses Move to Cabin — the aircraft arrests to a hover and holds position while they walk the cabin. Both follow the same autoHoverOnExit toggle. This prevents the aircraft from flying away unmanned. The auto-engage only fires when the aircraft is genuinely flying: more than 3.5 m AGL, with the engine and rotor at running speed.
If the pilot is killed while in their seat, Autohover does not engage. The helicopter continues on its last heading until someone takes control or it crashes.

​
Server Configuration

Since v0.2.9 the Autohover toggles live in the per-flight-mode profiles — so you can, for example, keep it on in Simple and disable it in Advanced: The profile matching the server’s gameplay.flightMode is the live one — see Flight Mode Profiles. See Controls Reference for the full list of flight keys including the Autohover toggle.