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GUIDE · INTERMEDIATE · 4 MIN READ

How to aerial

Hold boost, jump and pull the stick back to tip your nose up, then keep boosting and you fly. The four steps, the settings that help and the drills to practise in.

To aerial in BonnetBall, hold BOOST to build speed, tap JUMP and pull the stick back to tip your nose up, then keep holding BOOST. In the air, boost pushes harder than gravity pulls, so you fly. Let go just before you reach the ball and meet it with your bonnet.

How to hit your first aerial · 0:24 · transcript on the video page

What an aerial is

An aerial is any time you fly your car up to hit the ball in the air. It’s how you reach crosses, high bounces and balls dropping off the walls, and how you score from them. The game has its own names for them: a hit in the air, more than two metres up, is a VOLLEY, and a goal from one is a DIVING HEADER.

How to aerial, step by step

  1. Hold BOOST to build up speed towards the ball, with the ball straight ahead of you.
  2. Tap JUMP and pull the stick back to tip your nose up. On touch controls, back means down the screen: the AERIALS drill puts it as jump, pull the stick down to tilt back, then hold boost.
  3. Keep holding BOOST, and you’ll fly. Your car flies where its nose points, so use the stick to keep the nose on the ball, not above or below it.
  4. Let go just before you reach the ball, and meet it with your bonnet. Hit the middle of the ball with your nose to send it straight. Catch it off-centre and it goes off to the side.

That’s the version in our first aerial video, recorded on the touch controls with each button lit up as the car uses it.

A faster take-off: jump twice

For higher balls, the drill’s advice is to jump twice for a faster take-off, and keep the nose pointed at the target. Jump, pull back and boost, then centre the stick and tap JUMP once more for the double jump. Your first jump also goes higher if you hold JUMP for a moment. If your taps are short, switch on FULL JUMP ON TAP in Settings › Controls › Jump & Flip, and every tap gives a full-height jump. More in how to flip and double jump.

Settings that help

  • The AERIAL button. The CASUAL layout has a one-tap AERIAL button that presses JUMP and BOOST together: hold it and pull the stick down. You can add it to any other layout from the tray in EDIT LAYOUT (pause a match, then Settings › Controls › Layout).
  • INVERT AIR PITCH (Settings › Controls › Scheme) swaps up and down for tipping the nose in the air. If pulling down to climb feels wrong, turn it on and push up instead.
Settings › Controls › Jump & Flip: flip input, flip neutral, swipe to flip and jump slide-in

Practise it

Start with TRAINING › ADVANCED DRILLS › AERIALS. It has four steps, each with a full tank: fly through a low ring, fly through a high ring, hit a hovering ball in the air, then aerial the ball into the goal. The coach chip shows your height in metres as you climb.

Next, the SHOT CHALLENGES. AIR SHOTS comes in BEGINNER, INTERMEDIATE and ADVANCED sets of eight shots, all with a full tank, and the clock for each shot drops from 8 seconds to 6 as you move up. You earn a star at 3, 5 and all 8. Then try Free Play: pop the ball up, chase it, and use REWIND to go back a few seconds and take the same aerial again. The HEIGHT readout shows how high you got. Once the drill and the sets feel easy, the fast aerial guide covers the double-jump take-off in full, with its timing window.

ADVANCED DRILLS: wall driving, aerials, air roll, half flip, recovery and kickoffs, each with its steps

Common mistakes

  • Taking off too late. The ball is already overhead and you fly underneath it. The drill’s hint: take off early, aim the nose at the ball and boost.
  • Nose too high. Pull back too far and you climb past the ball. Tip the nose up, then ease off the stick and hold it on the ball.
  • Running out of boost. A full tank lasts about three seconds of boosting, and every kickoff starts you with a third of one. Check the meter before you go up, and read how to use boost to keep it topped up.
  • Losing the ball. Keep BALL FOCUS on while you learn, as in the tip below.

Why does my car backflip when I try to aerial?

Because the stick was already pulled back when you tapped JUMP the second time. A second jump tap with the stick pushed flips the car that way, and pulled back means a backflip. Centre the stick for the double jump, then pull back again. FLIP INPUT, in Settings › Controls › Jump & Flip, changes how a second tap chooses between a flip and a double jump.

Why do I keep missing the ball in the air?

Usually because your nose isn’t pointing at it. Line the nose up with the ball early, make small corrections on the way up, and stop pulling back once it’s there. If you’re turned at an odd angle when you arrive, an air roll afterwards gets your wheels back under you for the landing.

Keep BALL FOCUS on while you learn, so you never lose sight of the ball. Once aerials feel natural, try it off: the camera then looks where your car points, which the game itself suggests for aerials. The icon-only BALL FOCUS button sits top right.

Updated 20 October 2026

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