In Rocket League, many closely fought matches are lost because a player couldn’t get to the ball in time. This happens a lot while defending against last-minute aerial shots at your net. This is why it’s good to know how to fast aerial.
Most Rocket League players are proficient at performing simple aerials for doing things like taking shots on the goal, passing the ball to teammates, or defending. By simple aerials I mean, single jump aerials or jumping, boosting, and tilting back at the same time.
But as you progress higher in the Rocket League rank system, you’ll realize that performing basic aerials is not sufficient. At middle and higher ranks, the game begins to get more competitive, and so every time the ball is in the air, it becomes crucial to get to it before your opponents.
In my case, there was a point when I began to realize something was wrong with my aerial defense. This was when the opponents were frequently beating me to the ball in the air and scoring goals against my team. These were no longer one-off events. So I began to search online on how to make my aerial jumps faster, and that’s how I came to know about fast aerials.
A fast aerial is a mechanic that involves boosting while double jumping, which when done correctly, allows you to launch your car into an aerial quicker than with any other means in the game. Hence, the name fast aerial.
Fast Aerials are deceptively simple to understand but are moderately hard to practice, learn, and master. This is why few people are seen performing fast aerials in online matches, and even fewer do it correctly. In this essay, we’ll look at an easy way to learn how to fast aerial (on controller and keyboard). Next, we’ll see how to check if you’re fast aerialing correctly, the common mistakes to avoid, and when to use fast aerial. Finally, I’ll share some useful custom training packs that will help you practice the fast aerial mechanic.
Easy way to learn how to Fast Aerial
In theory, it may seem like a fast aerial is easy to perform, but it is actually quite hard to execute correctly. This is because the sequence in which the order of events needs to be performed is a little tricky.
To perform a basic aerial jump, one has to jump while holding down boost. To perform a fast aerial one has to double jump while pointing the nose of your car upwards, and while holding down boost all the time. But hold on, there is a difference between a boosted double jump and a fast aerial. That difference is in the first jump.
Here is a simple breakdown of the fast aerial mechanic for controllers as well as for keyboards and mouse.
Step 1: Press and hold boost.
(Controller: R1, RB / O, B | Mouse: Left-Click)
Step 2: Press and hold jump.
(Controller: X, A | Mouse: Right-Click)
Step 3: Pull the left analog stick backward
(Keyboard: S)
Step 4: Release the left analog stick (Keyboard: S) THEN press jump again
(Controller: X, A | Mouse: Right-Click)
Step 5: Continue holding boost
(Controller: R1, RB / O, B | Mouse: Left-Click)
As you can see, there’s quite a lot to unpack here. Let’s first start with what people do wrong.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
Since performing a fast aerial is all about timing each individual step to perfection, it is easy to get confused and execute the individual steps in an incorrect order. If you suspect that you are fast aerialing incorrectly, then chances are that you must be committing one of these five common mistakes.
- Not holding down first jump
- Back flipping
- Not holding down boost through the entire mechanic
- Not pointing the nose of your car vertically upwards
- Bad timing
To begin with, let’s start with mistake #1. Yes, fast aerials employ long first jumps. In fact, holding down the jump button the first time is quintessential to fast aerialing. How long should you hold it down? Not longer than 200-250 milliseconds since it’s pointless holding down jump longer than that. If you aren’t familiar with long-holds on jump, you can practice it in free play.
Next, let’s talk about mistake #5. The important thing in fast aerials is that steps 2, 3, and 4 are very close in timing. So much so that one could argue that these are in fact one single step because when you watch someone performing a fast aerial, you will notice how step 2 leaks into step 3 which leaks into step 4. If your timing is bad, you’ve just got to go back into free play and spend more time practicing till your doing it right.
Speaking of step 4, let’s talk about mistake #4. The reason we pull the left analog stick backward in this step is that we want the nose of our car to point upwards. That’s the whole point of a fast aerial, you want to go vertically upwards as fast as possible. Just remember not to hold the stick back long enough into your second jump, since that will cause you to back-flip.
And that brings us to mistake #2. I know back-flipping is a common problem while learning how to fast aerial, but try to understand the theory behind why it happens. Technically, you can lean your car how much ever backward you want with a single jump, the backflip will only happen if your backward lean leaks into your second jump because that makes it a dodge.
So if you are back-flipping, you are either not releasing the left analog before you hit jump again or you may have to tweak your dodge deadzone settings. Again, this is something that you should try and test for yourself practically in free play.
The only remaining mistake, mistake #3 is not holding down boost all the time. This may be one point in the essay where an SSL Pro reading this guide will disagree and talk about the nuances in different kinds of jumps and how you sometimes need to boost before and sometimes need to boost after the double jump. No arguments, I agree.
But for the purposes of learning the mechanic, it is much better to get used to boosting before your first jump and holding it the entire time, mainly because mid-level players are mostly going to begin deploying their aerial skills for defense. Also, this is a physics-based game – if you want to travel upwards faster, anytime you are not using boost, you’re obviously going slower.
Once you are fully comfortable with fast aerialing while holding boost all the time, it is very easy to read the situation and control your boost input.
Obviously holding down boost continuously while executing the mechanic is hard with default controller key binds in which boost and jump are adjacent to one another and easier with the alternate controller button mapping where boost is on R1 (PlayStation) or RB (XBOX). If on the other hand, your thumbs are long and skinny like mine and fat-fingering is not for you then alternate key binds are something you may want to explore.
How to tell if you’re doing it right?
The biggest indicator that you are doing your fast aerials right is the reduction in time taken to gain altitude. In your games, you may begin to get a sense of this if you start beating your opponents or matching them to the ball that is up in the air.
Besides that, you can even test your double jumps using certain custom training packs. For instance, a lot of shots in doomsee’s double jump aerials pack require you to be on top of the ball in a very short span of time. Technically, those shots are impossible without properly pulling off fast aerial launches.
Another training pack that lets you check if you are fast aerialing is one created by HKMilkTea. This training pack positions the ball near the ceiling and has a timer that runs out (kinda like musty’s speed flip pack). The codes of HKMilkTea’s pack and doomsee’s pack are in the practice section below.
When is Fast Aerial useful?
As soon as some players begin fast aerialing, the first question that comes to their minds is, “Should I always fast aerial?”. No, you should not. Please don’t fall under the impression that just because you can fast aerial, there is no other way to aerial.
Instead, ask yourself some questions of basic common sense, like:
- Is the ball directly above me?
- Do I need to get to the ball ASAP to perhaps dunk it?
- Do I need to beat an opponent to the ball that is in the air?
- Is there any reason why I need to be up in the air really high and really fast?
If the answers to these questions are yes, then by all means use a fast aerial. But if not, there is no need to keep fast aerialing all the time. Also, once you learn the basics of fast aerialing and don’t have to hold boost all through your fast aerial, you’ll realize how fast aerialing, in some cases, is more economical w.r.t. boost expenditure. So in advanced gameplay, you could add a fifth question to the list “do I need to conserve boost?”.
Practice & Custom Training Packs
The trickiest bit in fast aerialing is that the input to orient the car’s nose towards the ceiling comes right in-between the two jumps. This is one of the things that makes this mechanic hard but definitely not impossible to learn. The best approach to practice fast aerials is by heading into free play and following the step-by-step breakdown mentioned above. Begin with step 1 and do it until you feel comfortable, then add the next step on top of it. Then do the two steps back-to-back until you feel confident enough to add the third, and so on. I call this method of learning rocket league mechanics layering.
Once you have it all imprinted into your muscle memory (it may take weeks, don’t give up) then you can start messing around with custom training packs to perfect the technique and fast aerial like a pro. Here are the codes for a few of my favorite training packs that help with fast aerialing.
Double Jump Aerials by Doomsee: F269-B159-0BAC-AC2E
Fast Aerial Check by HK Milk Tea: C3E7-55B3-F66D-0E12
Aerial Shots Redirects by Poquito: 8D93-C997-0ACD-8416
Aerial Shots Passes by Poquito: C7E0-9E0B-B739-A899
Virge’s Fast Aerials Pack: F6D6-E749-4D17-484D
SirBabyBones’ Fast Aerial Pack: 0483-2F50-A029-F11F
