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Autohover parks the helicopter in mid-air at the press of a key. It slows down, stops, and then sits there.
Autohover is not the Autopilot. Autohover (X) holds you where you are. The Autopilot (P) flies you to a place you pick on a map. They are separate — switching one on never quietly switches the other on. They meet at one point only: when the autopilot arrives, it hands over to an Autohover hold.

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Switching it on

Press X in the pilot seat. What happens:
  1. The helicopter slows down from whatever speed it was doing
  2. It settles into a hover
  3. It then holds its height, its heading and its spot on the map — the heading stays put rather than slowly drifting off
It fades in rather than snapping on: about 0.83 seconds to take full hold, and about 0.4 seconds to let go again when you switch it off, so it never snatches the aircraft away from you. The hold also needs rotor speed to work with — nothing below roughly 50% rotor, full strength by about 70%. Engage it with the rotor still winding up and nothing much happens until the rotor catches up. The HUD shows whether Autohover is on, so the crew can see at a glance.
Only the seat that has the controls can switch Autohover on: the pilot seat, or the co-pilot seat after a handover with T. It refuses in two cases: sitting on the ground with the engine off, and tipped so far over that the aircraft is nearly on its side. Switching it on while airborne with the engine off is allowed, so you can practise autorotation against it.

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Flying while it is on

Autohover is a hold you can fly against, not a lock you have to switch off first:
  • Steering does not switch it off. Push the stick and the hold eases its grip; let go and it grabs hold again wherever you have got to. You can reposition without ever touching X
  • While it is on, the cyclic is softened to about 55% of its normal strength and the aircraft will not lean past 40°. Deliberate aerobatics need the hold off
  • The collective still works normally. Climb or descend, and the moment you stop the hold latches on to the new height
This is the whole point of it: switch it on over your landing spot, nudge yourself into position, ride the collective down, and never fight a toggle while you are doing it.

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Switching it off

Press X again. The hold releases over about 0.4 seconds and you have full control. If an autopilot flight is running, switching Autohover off cancels that as well — one press and everything is back in your hands. Steering does not switch it off. Apart from the X key, the only things that release the hold are:
  • the helicopter being on the ground with the engine off
  • the engine being stopped in flight
  • the main or tail rotor being destroyed or torn off
  • the helicopter being destroyed
  • a new pilot getting into the seat — they start with manual control

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When it switches itself on

Autohover switches itself on if the pilot leaves the helicopter while it is flying, when the pilot uses Move to Cabin — the aircraft steadies itself and holds position while they walk about in the back — and when the pilot switches to the co-pilot seat in flight, because the co-pilot seat cannot fly the aircraft. All three follow the same autoHoverOnExit setting. It stops the aircraft flying away with nobody at the controls. This only happens when the helicopter is genuinely flying: more than 3.5 m above the ground, with the engine and rotor running. It also stays out of the way while the autopilot is flying — that flight simply carries on.
If the pilot is killed in their seat, the helicopter counts as having nobody aboard. An aircraft left flying with no living crew — engine and rotor running, fuel in the tank, more than 2.5 m up — is picked up by the abandoned-aircraft logic: it is brought to a stop and then lands itself after autoPilot.abandonedLandingDelay seconds (default 20). See Thresholds & Toggles. It no longer flies on until it crashes. Servers that would rather a dead pilot cost the aircraft can set autoShutdownOnExitGroundOnly to 0, which cuts the engine on the spot and lets it autorotate down instead of landing itself.

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On the Ospreys

The CV-22B and MV-22B Ospreys are tilt-rotors, and Autohover — like auto-land, away from a marked runway — flies them only as helicopters. Switching it on swings the nacelles up, and you keep control until they are nearly there; a notification tells you so. If they stop on the way, slow down: they only come fully up at helicopter speeds. Auto-land waits until they are back in helicopter mode before it starts the landing approach. Switching Autohover on while the autopilot is cruising an Osprey on its wing brings it back to helicopter mode, as fast as its speed allows. The autopilot map’s range on the fuel aboard allows for the aeroplane cruise on trips over 5 km — see Autopilot.
While Autohover holds the aircraft, the pilot can look through the chin camera on the aircraft that have one.

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Server Configuration

The Autohover settings live in the per-flight-mode profiles, so you can keep it on in Simple and turn it off in Advanced. The profile that matches the server’s flight.flightMode is the one in use — see Flight Mode Profiles. See the Controls Reference for the full list of flight keys.