Aerial car control. This is the skill that separates the boys from the men. The casual from the serious. The indifferent from the dedicated. The “Whoops…” from the “Nice Shot!”... You get the idea. One could argue that this is the most essential skill you need to master if you hope to climb through the ranks. When I am in a competitive game and the opposing team scores their first goal with an upside-down-twisted aerial which gave them just the right angle to knock the ball in, I know it’s going to be a tough game. There are multiple ways to practice and I will go over what helped me learn the basics in lower ranks as well as the more core practice I currently use.

Basic Practice

So you can fly up and hit the ball with pretty decent consistency. Now what? To start to get a feel for the skills you are going to learn, it’s best to start in free play. Start at one goal and fly to the opposite center goal post. This should be pretty easy flying straight on. Once you have a pretty good grip doing that you should do the same thing but air roll so you’re flying upside down. If this is your first time flying upside down, it will likely be off-putting with the inverted controls. Once you are able to consistently hit the center of the opposite goal post flying upside down, you can move on to the sides.

After taking off, air roll so you’re flying sideways. Sideways flying is a bit of a struggle because the controls are completely different. It is important to learn to fly both sideways left and sideways right. How practical is this? Unfortunately not very. You are likely not going to fly from your goal during a game to the opposite end of the pitch upside down to hit the ball. However, it will give you a foundation for which to learn the intermediate and core aerial car control skills.

Intermediate Practice

This set of aerial car control skills takes you in a slightly different direction but is equally important to learn. It comes from "Musty’s 10 Rocket League Drills That Will Skyrocket Your Mechanics". Specifically the Aerial Car Control Drills 6-9.

To sum it up, you want to go into free play on the Pillars Rocket Labs map with unlimited boost and Ball Cam off. In the first drill, you want to be doing figure eights around the pillars while feathering your boost in the air. You can use air roll to adjust so that the camera is always behind to be able to see where you are going. The next drill is the same thing, but without using air roll. This makes it trickier, as the camera will disorient you a little bit going around corners. The third drill is doing figure eights while always air rolling. As explained in the video, the best way to do this is while holding your air roll button keep your left joystick either diagonal left or diagonal right. The last drill is doing figure eights always holding boost. With the last drill, you can air roll slightly to adjust as holding the boost the whole time is pretty challenging by itself.

Core Practice

This is where you really start to get serious about practicing aerial car control. If you are anything like me, you will sink hours and hours into these drills. I can’t explain it any better than Kevpert’s Aerial Car Control video below. Now that there is a resting ball to hit, you can start to incorporate air rolls before hitting the ball to get a better angle.

Now that you have a pretty good grip on aerial car control, you still need to find a way to incorporate it in-game. I find the best thing to do is to try out a new skill in a casual match. For example, you could tell yourself, “In this match, during any aerial I go up for, I will air roll before I make contact no matter what.” Remember that mastering aerial car control isn’t something that will happen overnight so keep practicing and I’ll see you on the pitch.