Why is it intuitive to have the up and down arrow keys reversed in flight simulation games?

Question

Some examples include: Flight Simulator, Descent (technically a FPS game), Terminal Velocity.

I've tried reconfiguring the keys to make the up key move the view upwards, and the down key downwards. But this felt really unintuitive. I'm wondering if the reason for this is because I'm simply used to having the keys reversed, or if there's another reason why it feels intuitive to have the up and down keys reversed.

Answer

Here's my guess for how it feels to control a flying vehicle. Also, here are some bits of flight dynamic terminology.

Pretend you are sitting in a plane. Imagine the plane has a big imaginary stick poking out the top of it, and you are holding a flight stick whose position represents how you want the imaginary stick to move.

In that case, how would you make the plane go up? You would pull the stick backward, because that would make the plane tilt backward and its nose point upward.

To make the plane go left, you could yaw by twisting the flight stick... but I don't think real planes can do that altogether well, so instead you would tilt the stick left for roll and then pull back for upward pitch. [Edit: See comments, apparently planes can move this way just not super fast.]

But as for whether you are just used to controls this way, I think so. A whole lot of people prefer non-inverted Y axis controls in games. But as you and I both know, those people are crazy ;). Once you get used to controls like these for flight games, it makes sense that would translate to preferring inverted Y for FPS games as well - that's what happened with me and StarFox.

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