When you're flying offline (choose the Attack Everything game), you will notice that there is a drone aircraft circling at 5,000 feet above each airfield. This lesson will show you how to make your approach and hit them with your guns.

1. Choose an aircraft and set your convergence to 200 yards.

2. Takeoff and climb to around 5,000 feet.

3. Start making your approach to the enemy plane. You'll be carrying out a fairly classic six attack, but as the drone is turning, you'll have to lead him slightly with your guns. This is called pulling lead. You fire ahead of the drone - at the place where the drone will be when your bullets get to him.

4. Now you need to match speed and attitude with your target. The easy bit with the drone is (apart from the fact that he doesn't dodge or shoot back) that we know his height and speed, and we can also see the course that he's following.

   The drone is circling the airfield at 5,000 feet and 200mph.

5. Approach the drone at about 220mph keeping your gunsight slightly ahead of him. At 500 yards (D5), start to bring your speed down.

Use very gentle inputs on the joystick. Fly the plane - not the stick. If you jerk the stick around, you'll tend to porpoise through the sky, going high up and then far below the drone.

6. Ensure that you keep your aircraft's wings at the same angle as the drone's wings - it'll make it much easier to line him up (see the picture below).

7. When you get to 100 yards, slide off center to the right (in this case), and aim ahead of him. Imagine the very spot he is flying to, pulling to, sliding to, pushing to, and shoot there.

   Use short bursts of fire so that you can make corrections in your aim. Don't hold the trigger down. If you hit him, you will see flashes on the drone.

   Rudder pedals will help immensely here to make small corrections in your aim.

   The drones can be set to be invulnerable (or not) by setting the correct option in the Flight Setup screen.

   As a matter of interest, in the picture below, my left guns are hitting Pyro's fuselage and my right guns are hitting his wing. My convergence was set to 300 yards. In this case, I should have set it to 150 yards to get a better concentration of fire.

If you can't seem to ping the drone consistently, or if you suspect that your gunnery percentages are too low, try using the keyboard fire buttons to shoot with (instead of the trigger on the joystick). The keys are [F] for primary guns, and [B] for secondary guns. If that improves your gunnery, then you are not "squeezing" the trigger, but pulling it. Every time you pull the trigger, you are pulling the joystick back slightly, and most of your bullets are going over the target.

 
That's it - repeat 5 zillion times. And then try faster diving approaches and so on. Have fun - and take it easy on Pyro.