Flying is absolutely possible in Horizon Forbidden West, but not in the way many players expect when they first step into the Burning Shores–sized map. This isn’t a game where Aloy suddenly grows wings or turns every machine into an air taxi. Flying is a deliberate, story-gated traversal upgrade that recontextualizes exploration rather than replacing it.
If you’ve been eyeing those sheer cliffs, unreachable spires, or massive machine sites and wondering when the game finally lets you ignore terrain, the answer is simple: yes, you can fly, but only when the story says you’re ready. And when it happens, it fundamentally changes how you approach the world.
What “Flying” Actually Means in Forbidden West
Flying in Horizon Forbidden West means mounting a specific machine: the Sunwing. This isn’t freeform aerial movement or a tool you equip at will. It’s a mount, governed by the same override rules as Chargers, Bristlebacks, or Clawstriders, with its own movement physics and limitations.
Once unlocked, the Sunwing allows true three-dimensional traversal. You can take off vertically, gain altitude, glide across the map, and land almost anywhere with enough clearance. It’s the closest the series gets to full air control, and it immediately trivializes certain traversal puzzles that were clearly designed for ground play earlier on.
When Flying Is Unlocked (No Spoilers)
Flying is unlocked very late in the main story, during a critical main quest called Wings of the Ten. There is no way to access flight earlier through side content, skill trees, or optional machine overrides. If you haven’t reached that quest yet, you cannot fly, no matter how much of the map you’ve explored.
This pacing is intentional. Guerrilla locks flight behind narrative progression to preserve exploration balance, enemy aggro patterns, and world design. Once you unlock it, the game assumes you’ve already engaged deeply with ground traversal, climbing tools, and standard mounts.
How the Sunwing Mount Works
The Sunwing functions as a permanent override once unlocked. You don’t need crafting materials or repeat hacking to call one in the wild. If the terrain allows it, Aloy can summon a Sunwing almost anywhere outdoors, similar to other mounts.
In the air, movement is smooth and forgiving. There’s no stamina meter for flight, no fuel, and no complex aerial maneuvers to manage. Ascending, descending, and banking are intuitive, designed for exploration first, spectacle second.
Limitations You Need to Know
Flying does not turn Horizon Forbidden West into an aerial combat game. You cannot use bows, traps, or abilities while airborne. The Sunwing has no offensive capabilities, and enemy machines won’t dogfight you in the sky.
Certain areas restrict landing, especially dense interiors, underground zones, or story-critical locations. Weather and vertical geometry can also affect how easily you can touch down. Flight complements traversal, but it doesn’t replace climbing tools, Shieldwing gliding, or ground-based stealth.
Practical Uses Beyond Fast Travel
The real power of flying is information. From the air, you can scout machine sites, identify patrol routes, mark resources, and plan engagements without pulling aggro. It’s an unmatched recon tool that lets you choose fights instead of stumbling into them.
Flight also drastically reduces backtracking fatigue. Late-game side quests, collectibles, and map cleanup become far more efficient when you can bypass cliffs, ruins, and hostile chokepoints entirely. Used smartly, the Sunwing isn’t just convenience—it’s control over the open world itself.
When Flying Becomes Available: Main Quest Requirement Explained (No Major Spoilers)
All of that freedom in the sky is deliberately held back until Horizon Forbidden West knows you’re ready for it. Guerrilla doesn’t tease flight early or drip-feed it through side content. It arrives at a very specific story moment, tied directly to a late-game main quest.
The Exact Main Quest That Unlocks Flight
Flying becomes available during the main quest titled Wings of the Ten. This is not optional content, and there’s no alternate path or early exploit to access it. Once this quest is completed, the Sunwing mount is permanently unlocked across your save.
The game makes it unmistakably clear when this moment happens. You won’t accidentally miss it, and you won’t need to hunt down extra overrides or complete follow-up steps afterward.
How Far Into the Story This Is
Wings of the Ten is a late-game quest, positioned well after the Forbidden West has fully opened up. By this point, you’ve already unlocked most core traversal tools, fought high-tier machines, and engaged with the main factions driving the narrative.
In practical terms, expect to be deep into the main storyline, not hovering at the midpoint. If you’re still bouncing between early regional quests or just unlocked the Base, you’re not close yet.
Why Flight Is Locked This Late
This timing isn’t arbitrary. Flight fundamentally breaks traditional exploration flow, enemy placement, and environmental gating. Unlocking it earlier would trivialize machine sites, puzzle ruins, and vertical challenges built around climbing and gliding.
By the time you earn a Sunwing, the game assumes you understand aggro ranges, terrain funneling, and how to read machine patrol logic. Flight becomes a strategic layer on top of that knowledge, not a replacement for it.
What Changes Immediately After the Quest
Once Wings of the Ten is complete, you can summon a Sunwing in valid outdoor areas without re-hacking one. There’s no cooldown, no maintenance cost, and no story restrictions preventing you from using it freely.
From that point forward, the open world effectively recontextualizes itself. Routes you once fought through become optional, vertical obstacles disappear, and exploration shifts from survival to precision planning.
Unlocking the Sunwing: How the Flying Mount Is Introduced
The transition into flight isn’t handled like a typical mount unlock. Horizon Forbidden West treats the Sunwing as a narrative and mechanical escalation, introducing it through a tightly controlled sequence that teaches you the rules before cutting you loose.
Rather than dropping a flying override into your inventory, the game walks you through why the Sunwing matters, how it fits into the world’s tech hierarchy, and what makes it fundamentally different from every ground mount you’ve used so far.
The Scripted First Flight
Your first encounter with the Sunwing happens during Wings of the Ten, and it’s fully guided. You don’t immediately gain free-form control; instead, the game funnels you through a controlled takeoff and short traversal segment to teach altitude, momentum, and landing behavior.
This section is deliberately low-pressure. There’s no combat, no aggressive AI, and no fail-state tied to movement precision. The goal is muscle memory, not mastery.
How the Sunwing Override Works
Once the quest completes, the Sunwing override is permanently added to your toolkit. Unlike earlier mounts, you do not need to override a Sunwing in the wild to use it again.
If you’ve unlocked flight, you can summon a Sunwing on demand in most outdoor spaces. The game treats it as a universal traversal tool rather than a fragile resource, removing the friction that would otherwise discourage experimentation.
Understanding Sunwing Controls and Behavior
Flying is intentionally streamlined. You’re not managing stamina, fuel, or wind resistance, and there’s no complex pitch or roll system to fight against.
Altitude is binary rather than granular. You either climb, cruise, or descend, with generous hitboxes that prevent accidental collisions on takeoff and landing. It’s closer to controlled gliding with vertical freedom than full flight simulation.
Limitations You’ll Notice Immediately
Despite how powerful flight feels, the Sunwing has strict boundaries. You can’t use it indoors, in tight canyons, or in certain story-critical zones designed around ground traversal.
Combat is also limited. You can’t fire weapons while mounted, and hostile machines will often disengage once you gain enough altitude. Flight is about repositioning and scouting, not aerial DPS or hit-and-run abuse.
Practical Tips for Using Flight Effectively
Use the Sunwing as a planning tool, not a shortcut. Scouting machine sites from above lets you tag high-threat units, identify patrol routes, and choose clean entry points without pulling aggro.
When exploring, land slightly outside points of interest instead of directly on top of them. This avoids awkward dismounts, keeps stealth intact, and prevents scripted encounters from triggering prematurely.
Fast travel becomes optional once you’re airborne, but not obsolete. The Sunwing shines when chaining objectives efficiently, especially in vertical regions where climbing and gliding would otherwise slow progression.
How the Sunwing Mount Works: Controls, Takeoff, Landing, and Navigation
With the Sunwing unlocked, flight becomes a natural extension of your traversal loop rather than a separate system to learn. Guerrilla clearly designed it to feel intuitive on a controller, prioritizing readability and momentum over sim-style complexity. If you can ride a ground mount and use the Shieldwing, you already understand 90 percent of how flying works.
Summoning and Takeoff
You summon the Sunwing the same way you would any mount, as long as you’re outdoors and not in a restricted story zone. The game handles positioning automatically, spawning it nearby with enough clearance to avoid awkward geometry or instant collisions.
Takeoff is immediate and forgiving. Once mounted, a single input lifts you cleanly into the air, snapping Aloy into a stable cruising altitude without requiring manual lift management. There’s no runway logic or acceleration window to worry about, which keeps the focus on navigation rather than execution.
In-Flight Controls and Navigation
Flight controls are deliberately simplified to avoid fighting the camera or the terrain. You control forward movement and turning on a flat plane, while separate inputs handle climbing and descending in clearly defined steps.
This creates a layered movement model rather than true analog altitude control. You won’t fine-tune elevation to the meter, but you also won’t clip a cliff face because of minor input errors. The Sunwing’s generous collision rules give you room to course-correct even in dense biomes.
Camera Behavior and Scouting
The camera pulls back slightly while flying, improving situational awareness without sacrificing landmark detail. This wider view is ideal for reading machine site layouts, spotting Tallnecks, or identifying traversal routes that would be invisible from the ground.
You can freely rotate the camera while cruising, letting you scout objectives without committing to a landing. This reinforces flight’s role as an intel-gathering tool rather than a raw speed upgrade.
Landing, Dismounting, and Precision Control
Landing is just as streamlined as takeoff. Descend toward solid ground and the Sunwing will auto-adjust, transitioning smoothly into a controlled landing without demanding perfect alignment.
For precision, slow your approach and aim for open terrain rather than tight rooftops or narrow ledges. Dismounting places Aloy safely with minimal animation lock, which helps maintain stealth and prevents accidental aggro when entering hostile zones.
What the Sunwing Will and Won’t Do
The Sunwing excels at long-distance travel, vertical exploration, and route planning, but it’s not a combat platform. You can’t attack while mounted, and enemies will often leash or disengage once you gain altitude.
Environmental rules still apply. Certain regions restrict flight entirely, and the game will gently push you back rather than letting you break progression. These constraints keep flight powerful without invalidating level design built around climbing, gliding, and ground-based encounters.
Flight Limitations and Restrictions You Should Know About
Flight in Horizon Forbidden West is intentionally powerful, but it’s also tightly controlled. Guerrilla designed the Sunwing to enhance exploration without trivializing the game’s traversal puzzles, combat arenas, or narrative pacing. Understanding these constraints upfront will save you frustration and help you plan routes more efficiently once flight is unlocked.
Flight Is Locked Behind a Late Main Quest
You cannot fly freely for most of the campaign, no matter how early you explore the map. The Sunwing becomes available only after completing a specific late-game main quest, meaning flight is designed as a capstone traversal tool rather than an early convenience.
This gating is deliberate. Many regions, Cauldrons, and climbing routes are built to teach gliding, grappling, and environmental navigation first, so flight doesn’t short-circuit those systems before you’ve mastered them.
Restricted Zones and Invisible Boundaries
Even after unlocking flight, not every area allows unrestricted air travel. Story-critical locations, certain settlements, and tightly scripted zones will either block flight outright or gently steer you away with invisible barriers.
Instead of hard walls, the game uses soft pushback. The Sunwing will lose forward momentum or auto-correct its path, signaling that you’re crossing a boundary without breaking immersion or control.
No Mounted Combat or Offensive Actions
The Sunwing is strictly a traversal mount, not a combat platform. Aloy cannot fire weapons, use valor surges, or deploy gadgets while airborne, and you won’t be dive-bombing machines for cheesy DPS.
Most enemies will drop aggro once you gain altitude, but ranged machines can still threaten you during takeoff or low passes. Treat flight as an escape, scouting, or repositioning tool, not a way to bypass encounters you plan to loot.
Altitude Control Is Step-Based, Not Freeform
While flight feels smooth, it isn’t true analog elevation control. Ascending and descending happens in fixed increments, which prevents precision hovering or micro-adjustments over tight spaces.
This design keeps navigation readable and avoids frustrating hitbox collisions with cliffs, trees, or ruined architecture. You trade fine control for consistency, which is especially noticeable when landing near dense machine sites or vertical ruins.
Weather, Terrain, and Line-of-Sight Still Matter
Flight doesn’t eliminate environmental awareness. Dense fog, storms, and extreme vertical terrain can obscure landmarks, making it easy to overshoot objectives or miss machine sites below.
Use the map and focus scans to compensate. Flying high gives you coverage, but dropping altitude periodically helps you read terrain layers and spot loot paths you’d otherwise glide right past.
You Can’t Skip All Traversal Challenges
Certain collectibles, puzzles, and side objectives still require ground-based traversal, even if you arrive by air. Vines, climb points, underwater routes, and locked interiors won’t suddenly become accessible just because you flew overhead.
Think of flight as a macro-navigation tool. It gets you where you want to go faster, but the game still expects you to engage with its climbing, swimming, and puzzle mechanics once you land.
Mount Availability Isn’t Universal
You don’t permanently summon a Sunwing anywhere, anytime. You need access to a valid spawn or landing area, and in some regions, Sunwings simply won’t appear.
This keeps flight from becoming a universal fast-travel replacement. Plan takeoffs near open terrain or known mount zones to avoid unnecessary backtracking.
Story Progression Still Takes Priority
Finally, flight won’t let you sequence-break major story beats. Key locations, objectives, and narrative reveals remain locked until the game is ready for you to see them.
The restriction isn’t about limiting freedom, but preserving pacing. When the world fully opens from the sky, it’s because Aloy has earned that perspective, mechanically and narratively.
Using Flight for Exploration: Fast Travel, Map Completion, and Hidden Areas
Once flight is unlocked through the main story and the Sunwing becomes available as a mount, exploration shifts from route-planning to opportunity scanning. The game’s restrictions still apply, but the scale of what you can cover in a single session changes dramatically. Used correctly, flight becomes the most efficient way to clean up the map without turning exploration into autopilot.
Flight vs. Traditional Fast Travel
Flight doesn’t replace fast travel, but it often beats it in practice. You avoid load screens, retain full control over your route, and can divert instantly when a new icon or structure catches your eye. For nearby objectives, flying is faster than opening the map, burning a pack, and waiting through a transition.
This is especially valuable when chaining errands. Contracts, salvage quests, and side objectives clustered across a region are far more efficient by air, since you can land directly near each marker instead of hopping between campfires.
Efficient Map Completion From the Sky
Flight turns map completion into a top-down checklist. Flying at medium altitude lets you reveal fogged areas quickly while still keeping terrain readable enough to spot campfires, machine sites, and unexplored ruins. Staying too high may uncover the map faster, but you’ll miss interactable details that don’t show up clearly on icons.
A strong rhythm is to sweep an area from above, drop for anything with vertical depth, then take off again. This minimizes backtracking and keeps Aloy moving forward instead of zigzagging on foot through already-cleared ground.
Reaching High-Value Hidden Areas
Some of Forbidden West’s best loot and optional content sits behind sheer cliffs, broken skyscrapers, or isolated mesas. Flight bypasses long climbing routes and platforming chains, letting you land near entrances the game fully expects you to approach from below.
That said, flight only gets you to the doorstep. Relic Ruins, Vista Points, and locked facilities still demand ground-based solutions once you’re inside. Use flight to access the location efficiently, then engage with the puzzle as designed.
Scouting Machine Sites and Safe Landings
From the air, you can scout machine compositions without pulling aggro. This is ideal for identifying Apex spawns, large machine patrol routes, or dangerous overlaps between sites. Mark what you want to fight, then land outside detection range to prep gear and valor surges.
Be mindful of where you touch down. Landing too close can trigger combat instantly, and the Sunwing isn’t built to tank hits. Treat it as insertion, not a combat opener.
Exploration Without Breaking Progression
Even with flight unlocked, the game subtly guides what’s worth engaging with. Some areas look accessible from the air but remain gated by story progression, special tools, or overrides you haven’t earned yet. If something feels incomplete, it probably is.
Flight shines brightest as a cleanup tool after major story beats. When regions fully open and systems are in place, the Sunwing lets you explore with intention instead of friction, turning the Forbidden West into a space you survey, choose, and conquer on your terms.
Combat While Flying: What You Can and Cannot Do
Once you’re comfortable using flight for scouting and access, the next question is obvious: can you actually fight from the air? Horizon Forbidden West gives you limited offensive options while flying, and understanding those limits is critical to avoiding unnecessary deaths or broken engagements.
Flying is about positioning and control, not raw DPS. The Sunwing is a traversal tool first, and the game enforces that design through very clear combat restrictions.
Direct Attacks: Severely Limited by Design
You cannot use melee attacks while mounted on a Sunwing. There are no aerial spear strikes, takedowns, or override interactions once you’re airborne. If a fight requires precision damage, component removal, or sustained pressure, you must dismount.
Ranged combat is also restricted. Aloy cannot freely aim or fire standard weapons while actively flying, meaning bows, slings, and spikes are off the table until you land. The game intentionally avoids turning flight into a dominant combat state.
When Enemies Can Hit You
While you can’t deal meaningful damage from the air, enemies absolutely can damage you. Large machines with ranged attacks, like Thunderjaws or Slaughterspines, can still tag the Sunwing if you fly too low or hover too long. Their projectile tracking isn’t perfect, but their hitboxes are large enough to punish careless positioning.
Smaller machines generally won’t aggro unless you dip into their detection radius. Staying high keeps you safe, but descending directly over a combat zone is risky and can pull attention fast.
Forced Dismounts and Why They Matter
If the Sunwing takes enough damage, Aloy will be forcibly dismounted. This drop offers minimal I-frames and can easily throw you into the middle of an encounter unprepared. On higher difficulties, this is one of the easiest ways to get chain-staggered or outright killed.
Because of this, flight should never replace proper engagement setup. Use it to choose your battlefield, not to improvise mid-fight.
Using Flight as a Combat Advantage
Where flight truly shines is pre-combat control. You can approach from any angle, mark machines, identify weak points, and plan your opening without burning resources or triggering aggro. Landing behind cover or on elevated terrain often gives you a massive positional advantage before the first shot is fired.
Flight also lets you disengage safely. If a fight goes sideways, creating distance and escaping upward is often faster and more reliable than sprinting or sliding through terrain.
What the Game Clearly Doesn’t Want You to Do
Horizon Forbidden West avoids aerial dominance on purpose. There’s no dive-bomb damage, no air-to-ground burst, and no way to cheese bosses by hovering above their attack patterns. The Sunwing is strong, but it’s not a shortcut through combat systems built around preparation, precision, and adaptability.
Think of flight as the perfect setup tool rather than a combat solution. Master that mindset, and flying becomes one of the most powerful ways to control encounters without ever trivializing them.
Post-Unlock Tips: Getting the Most Value Out of Flying in the Endgame
Once flight is unlocked through the main story and the Sunwing becomes a permanent option, the game quietly shifts how it expects you to explore. This isn’t just a new mount, it’s a late-game traversal layer designed to speed up cleanup, optimize planning, and reduce friction across the open world.
Used correctly, flying saves hours without undermining the core combat loop Horizon is built around.
Use Flight to Clean the Map Efficiently
Flying shines brightest during endgame map completion. Question marks, Black Boxes, Greenshine clusters, and side activities become dramatically faster to reach when terrain is no longer a factor.
Instead of fast traveling between campfires, use the Sunwing to chain objectives together. You’ll spend less time in menus and more time actually playing, which matters when you’re mopping up the last 20 percent of the map.
Understand When Flying Beats Fast Travel
Fast travel is still useful, but flight often wins on medium-distance routes. If the destination is within a single region, flying is usually faster than loading screens, especially on PS4 or older hardware.
Flight also preserves momentum. You can spot additional activities mid-route, detour without cost, and land directly where you want instead of jogging from a campfire spawn.
Exploration Scanning Is Where Flight Peaks
The Sunwing pairs extremely well with the Focus in the endgame. Flying high and scanning lets you tag machine sites, patrol routes, and loot caches without triggering combat.
This is ideal for planning precision engagements. You can land near high ground, set traps, or choose stealth openings with full information before any aggro is pulled.
Know the Hard Limits of the Sunwing
The game never lets flying replace progression gating. You can’t bypass locked areas, scripted encounters, or objective triggers by landing early.
Weather also matters. Storms, dense fog, and low visibility zones make aerial navigation riskier, especially when flying low near hostile machines with ranged attacks.
Manage the Sunwing Like a Late-Game Resource
The Sunwing isn’t disposable. If it takes heavy damage and forces a dismount, recovering cleanly can be harder than resetting on foot.
Avoid hovering near combat zones, don’t descend straight into machine sites, and treat landing zones like positioning decisions. A safe dismount matters just as much as a safe takeoff.
Pair Flight With Smart Loadouts
Endgame gear complements flight beautifully. Sharpshot Bows, high-accuracy Hunter Bows, and Tear-focused builds all benefit from the scouting advantage flight provides.
Use aerial recon to identify detachable components and plan tear openings. You’ll burn fewer resources and reduce RNG-driven chaos in tougher encounters.
Difficulty Scaling Makes Flight More Valuable, Not Less
On higher difficulties, flying isn’t about safety, it’s about control. Machines hit harder, punish mistakes faster, and leave less room for improvisation.
Flight gives you something invaluable in those modes: choice. You decide where fights start, when they end, and whether they happen at all.
Final Tip: Think Like a Hunter, Not a Pilot
Horizon Forbidden West never turns Aloy into an air-dominant power fantasy, and that’s intentional. The Sunwing exists to enhance decision-making, not bypass it.
Use flight to see more, plan better, and move smarter. When you do, the endgame opens up in a way that feels earned, efficient, and perfectly aligned with Horizon’s core design philosophy.