One job: keep the hulls out of the water. How a flight controller does it, control by control.
An F50 does not fly itself. One sailor, the flight controller, holds the boat a metre above the water through every tack, gybe and bear-away using two endless rollers, three thumb pads and a keypad of presets. This page takes the cockpit apart, explains what each control moves and why, and then asks what a designer would change.
The flight controller sits in the cockpit nearest the middle of the boat. Three surfaces face him, and because he crosses to the other hull on every manoeuvre, all three exist twice.
A Cosworth motorsport dash on the hull wall, below eye line. Boat speed, wind, and for each board its rake, cant and rudder rake, plus cylinder pressures. It is read in glances, not watched.
Eighteen backlit keys on a five by four grid, each with three status LEDs. Board drop targets, how fast boards and rudders move, upwind and downwind mode, and the safety calls. Set before the race, mostly left alone during it.
The pepper grinder. Two endless rollers, one per daggerboard, and three D-pads under the thumbs. This is where the boat is actually flown.
Made by SailGP Technologies and labelled Hull Controller on its face. The rollers have no end stop, so the hand never re-grips. Everything else is a thumb away.
Each roller rakes one daggerboard. On the F50 the whole board case pivots fore and aft, so rake is the main lift control and the most active input on the boat. The inside roller flies the opposite board, the outside roller the same side.
left up: Rudder average, up. Hans Henken: the D-pad up and down buttons control each rudder, which sets the boat's pitch and its differential. left down: Rudder average, down. The same shared rudder rake, the other way. left left: Hans Henken: the side buttons adjust cant, the angle the vertical strut leans in or out, for both boards. Billy Gooderham: inboard gives more lift at low speed. left right: The other side key adjusts cant outboard. Billy Gooderham: outboard gives righting moment and grip, and the full swing takes 8 to 10 seconds. left center: Upwind / downwind mode. One press swaps the whole software package: presets, gains, and how fast boards and rudders move. Downwind the boat runs 80 to 92 km/h and needs different feel.
middle up: Menu up. Printed on the pad; not explained in the source video. middle down: Menu down. Printed on the pad; not explained in the source video. middle left: Settings. Printed on the pad; not explained in the source video. middle right: Settings. middle center: Page enter. Printed on the pad; not explained in the source video.
right up: Rudder average, up, repeated on this pad. Hans Henken: he can adjust from either side of the boat because he ends up on both in tacks and gybes. right down: Rudder average, down, repeated on this pad. right left: Rudder swap. Printed on the pad and not explained in the source video. Billy Gooderham describes a max diff opposite that moves the differential to the other side; our inference is that this is it. right right: Max diff: one press puts rudder differential at the maximum, the most righting moment the boat can make. right center: Fast lift. Printed on the pad; not explained in the source video.
A Cosworth Omega ICD, a 6.2 inch full colour display with a strip of LEDs along the top and a 1 kHz logger inside. Redrawn here from the flight page shown dockside in the source video; the values are that snapshot, not live data.
Port is red and starboard is green everywhere on this boat: the dash, the lock lamp, the team's own diagrams.
Hans Henken calls these presets for setting up the boat before a race: board drop targets, how quickly the boards go in and come out, the angle they enter at, and the safety calls that also tell other boats something has gone wrong. Legends are shown exactly as printed, including the spelling.
Who holds the rake, and when. From the source video, 3:42 to 5:15.
The flight controller is on the port side flying the starboard board. One board up, three foils in the water.
The driver calls it. He takes the wing sheet from the wing trimmer, who crosses first.
The driver presses a foot button and the new board fires down. The flight controller holds the boat stable on rudders and cant while it drops.
Red for port, green for starboard. The board has locked. The flight controller now flies both boards with the rollers and both rudders with his thumbs.
The wing trimmer calls it and raises the old board. Focus shifts to the new leeward board, still on rudders and pitch.
The driver crosses and takes the rake on the wheel grip. He flies for a few seconds, about fifty a day in total.
The flight controller crosses to the new hull and takes the rake back. Straight line on starboard.
From Billy Gooderham's NorthStar walkthrough of the same control system after the 2025 T-foil change.
A very high pressure, push-pull hydraulic cylinder that snaps to the input. That is why rake can be the roller under the whole hand: the loop is tight.
A 180 bar system, but a slow cylinder. The full 14 to 15 degree swing takes 8 to 10 seconds, so cant is planned before a manoeuvre, not reacted to.
The leeward rudder lifts, the windward rudder pulls down. Max diff puts all of it on the windward side. A rudder out of the water loses the moment at once, and the boat nosedives.
Gravity, pumps, accumulators, and negative rake that sucks the board down as it hits the water. Then a physical lock takes the load of the whole flying boat.
The single most important fact about this interface is that the sailor is not looking at it.
I spend 85 percent of my time either focused on the bow or focused on the leeward daggerboard for my ride height, and this other 15 is split between a quick look at one of my screens [...] and a peek back to make sure I have enough rudder immersion.
The helmsman flies with twist grips on the wheel. Rudder pitch is set and locked before the start.
The F50 launches with a joystick for flight. It is not good enough; the flight controllers cannot catch the hull in time.
After Sydney, Luke Parkinson and Nick Hutton work with the control systems group on the Artemis simulator. A double twist grip with buttons, like a games controller, replaces the joystick. By San Francisco the flight controller flies the whole course.
Cant becomes an active axis. Same hardware, reassigned functions, hand-made stickers on the pads.
The unit in the U.S. team's video carries printed legends for the new functions, with upwind and downwind mode on a centre button.
This is one-design hardware owned by SailGP Technologies. No team can change it. What follows is a designer's exercise, not a claim about what SailGP should do.
Keep the rollers. The primary task owns the primary control, and that is right.
The one number that matters sits on a small screen the sailor looks at 15 percent of the time. The dash already has an LED strip, lit solid green at sea. Drive it with ride height error and put it on the coaming.
Upwind versus downwind changes how every control responds, and the evidence is three small LEDs. Tint the controller and keypad backlight by mode so it is known without reading.
Four keys in one cluster differ only by the word Mode: DB Up, DB Down, DB Up Mode, DB Down Mode. A latching mode and a momentary action should not look the same.
Seventeen key colours with no system. Colour by zone (safety, mode, boards, rudders, tuning), and expand or iconise every abbreviation.
Standby, board up and my rake are voice calls at 50 knots in a helmet. A pulse in the roller at board lock and at the rake handoff means the hand knows before the ear does.
Cant takes 8 to 10 seconds to swing and there is no visual cue of where it is. Show where it is going and when it arrives, as a small arc in the same strip.
T-foils give no notice before they let go; the old L-foils slid sideways first. A ride height ceiling warning, light and haptic, stands in for what the hull used to say.
The fore and aft angle of a foil relative to the boat. More rake, more lift.
How far the daggerboard's vertical strut leans under or out from the hull. Outboard gives righting moment and grip; inboard gives more lift at low speed.
How far the hulls fly above the water. Higher is faster and closer to the edge.
Opposite rake on the two rudders, lifting on one side and pulling down on the other, to make righting moment.
The shared rake of both rudders, which sets the boat's pitch.
Firing the new daggerboard down and locking it before a manoeuvre.
Flipping the wing's camber, or a foil's cant, to the other side.