I was re-reading the Aeronautica Imperialis background on Sunday night, which is a fairly normal way for me to waste an evening, and I got stuck on a line I’d forgotten was in there. Orks don’t like their pilots. Ork Flyboyz are semi-exiles inside their own society, and Games Workshop has been saying so in print for a very long time.
The passage runs like this. “Ork pilots are themselves outcasts from Ork society. Most Orks prefer to keep their feet firmly on the ground, and believe real fighting is done up close and personal.” It carries on: the reckless flying and dive bombing and strafing runs “seem to change their brain wave patterns, inducing a state of manic euphoria,” other Orks “consider them to be quite mad, and avoid them,” and Flyboyz “live in semi-exile from the tribal hierarchy, only associating with other Flyboyz, Gretchin slaves and gunners and the Mekboyz who build and maintain their aircraft.”
So the tribe routes around them. The Meks build their planes and the grots crew them, and beyond that they mostly keep to each other.
Then on Monday, Warhammer Community published the detachment rundown for Codex: Orks. Fifteen of them. Number eleven on the list is Flyboyz, and the description is three clauses long: Ork aircraft hit better when they’re riled up, they take up less of your strategic reserves, “and one can even become your Warlord for an Air Waaagh!”
A plane can’t be your Warlord
Since 10th Edition, the Warlord step of army building has been about as simple as 40K gets. You pick a Character model in your army, that model gains the Warlord keyword, and that’s the whole step. The requirement has always been the Character part.
Ork aircraft are not Characters. The Dakkajet isn’t, the Burna-Bommer isn’t, the Wazbom Blastajet has a Mek flying it and still isn’t. Which means the Flyboyz detachment has to be granting an exception to a core rule, and GW have given us one sentence about it. I don’t know what shape the exception takes. It might be a keyword swap in the detachment rules, it might be a specific aircraft, it might be that 11th has quietly loosened the Warlord requirement in a way I haven’t caught up with yet. Kiran reckons it’ll be a bespoke enhancement you buy onto one plane, and Kiran is usually right about this stuff in a way I find irritating.
The intent is clear enough. GW want you to be able to point at a plane and say that’s the boss of this army. In a faction where leadership is settled by being physically the largest and most violent thing present. Ork bosses grow with success as a literal biological process, and they do it by winning fights on the ground where the other Orks can see it happen. The Waaagh! is what happens when one of them gets big enough that other Orks start turning up to see what all the shouting’s about.
What an Ork Flyboy actually is
Both of the Aeronautica books are unusually specific about the Flyboyz, and it’s some of my favourite Ork writing.
Imperial Armour Aeronautica calls them “a peculiar type of Madboy” and “the ultimate Speed Freeks, racing through the skies at hundreds of miles per hour, only seconds away from a spectacular death by way of an exploding rokkit or dodgy squigfuel tank.” The Fighta-bommer specifically is held “in a peculiar position of honour” among them because it’s so badly built that the pilot gets to feel every bit of the engines and guns, which the book notes also leads to their early demise. That’s the book’s own reasoning, not mine.
The mechanical details are just as good. Ork aircraft can’t take off under their own wheels, so they’re loaded onto a launch trolley and dragged onto the runway, and the trolley gets released mid-climb and smashes back down. Landing is a controlled stall followed by belly-sliding along the strip with a hook dragging behind to slow you down.
And then there’s the grot. On a Fighta-bommer the crew is an Ork pilot and a Gretchin gunner, and the grot climbs through the cockpit and is sealed into the rear ball turret before take-off. If the crew has to bail, the pilot climbs out of the cockpit. The turret has no hatch of its own. The grot stays in it. My favourite doomed lad in the whole setting, and he isn’t even the worst-off gretchin on the airframe, because the same aircraft can carry grot bombs, which are guided missiles flown by Gretchin who are, in GW’s phrasing, “blissfully unaware of the fatal effects of the missile’s detonation.” I’ve written about what grots actually are before and I still find the bombs the bleakest bit of it.
You can see why the rest of the tribe keeps its distance. It’s the Ork equivalent of the bloke at work who only ever talks about his motorbike and eats lunch alone in the car park.
Skyboss Wingnutz
There’s one Ork in the material who got close to being what the Flyboyz detachment describes, and almost nobody talks about him.
Skyboss Wingnutz turns up in the Sanctus Reach books. His entry is two sentences long: he “had a near-religious experience upon the hive world of Ghul Jensen when he first piloted a Dakkajet,” and since then he “has amassed a ramshackle fleet of looted and kustomised aircraft that follow in his wake.” That’s it. That’s the whole character. A flyboy who liked it so much he started collecting planes and other flyboyz until he had a fleet, and got called Skyboss for it.
The bit that makes him interesting shows up somewhere else entirely. In The Hour of the Wolf, during the collapse at Scrap Peak, the Big Mek warlord Mogrok is watching his own battle come apart and the narration notes that “Wingnutz hadn’t left Mogrok many flyboyz to speak of, and the few he had were getting clobbered by the enemy planes.”
Wingnutz took the planes and went. A ground-bound Ork warlord lost a battle in part because his air arm had a boss of its own, and that boss had other ideas. Nobody in Sanctus Reach seems to treat this as a crisis of Ork governance, which is very Ork of them.
I went looking for more Wingnutz and there isn’t any. Two sentences and a mention in a battle he isn’t in. He’s the kind of character who exists because someone needed a name on an army list entry and then wrote something better than the job required…
The kit I never built
So yeah, I should probably own up. I have one of these. Somewhere. In a box, in a loft, in my mum’s house, which is where most of my worse hobby decisions ended up. It’s been there a while.
Around 2019 my local store had a second-hand shelf, the kind where people trade in half-started projects and the staff price them by vibes. There was an Ork bommer box on it, opened, sprues intact, someone had clipped exactly one wing off. I bought it. I don’t play Orks. I have never played Orks. I bought it because I’d been reading about Wazbom Blastajets that week and thought the canopy bits would be good for a Drukhari conversion I had a vague idea about.
That conversion never happened. The box went into a plastic tub with my other Kill Team bits and it is, as far as I know, still in that tub with one wing missing. Kiran has brought it up at least twice, both times while I was complaining about someone else’s pile of shame.
One box
The entire Ork air force, in 40K, is one plastic kit. Dakkajet, Burna-Bommer, Blitza-Bommer, Wazbom Blastajet: same box, four builds, one set of sprues that’s been in the range since 2012. That’s longer than I’ve been playing 40K by a couple of years.
GW has now built a detachment around it.
My first instinct was that this is a tell. You don’t hand a full detachment to a unit type with one ageing kit unless something’s coming, and the Ork release has already produced new Warbikers, new Nobz, a new Trukk, a new Mek. A new plane would fit the pattern neatly.
Then I actually looked at the other fourteen. Brute Bosses is a detachment that exists to make your Warboss better and comes with no stratagems at all. Wurrband does the same for psykers. Neither of those needs a new kit, and GW seem perfectly happy to publish a one-page detachment that just supports models you already own. Runt Swarm is arguably the most interesting design on the list and it’s built entirely on grots that have been in the range for years. So the “detachment implies kit” logic doesn’t hold up, and I talked myself out of it.
I’m not fully out of it, though. Fifteen detachments is a lot of surface area to fill, and eleven of them can be justified by units already in the codex, but aircraft are the one slot where the current offering is a single box that predates two editions. If I’m GW and I’m doing a soft-launch codex to open the edition, that’s the gap I’d be planning to fill in a year.
Competitively none of this matters, by the way. Spikey Bits called Runt Swarm and Shoota Boyz the two to watch, and they’re right, because bodies that score and shooting that doesn’t slow down are good in any edition. Flyboyz will not be good. Ork aircraft haven’t been good since 7th and the reserve manipulation isn’t going to fix that. I’d still run it. If I ever built a green army, which I won’t, I’d build it around planes and lose consistently and enjoy myself, in the same way I keep taking Ahriman into lists where a cheaper Sorcerer would do the same job.
The promotion
I like it more than I expected to. The Ork social order is one of the most consistent things in 40K: biggest wins, biggest gets bigger, everything else is noise. Handing the army to a category of Ork who by definition can’t win a fight on the ground is the first crack I can remember GW putting in that. It’s small, it’s buried in a bullet point in a preview article, and it’s the sort of thing that will never be explained in the codex lore section. But it’s there.
Imperial Navy pilots do roughly the same job in roughly the same kind of aircraft. They get animations, hand-painted kill markings, callsigns, and an ace tradition the setting treats as a proper warrior culture. Ork society gives its pilots a Mek to build the plane and a grot to sit in the back of it.
Codex: Orks goes up for pre-order this weekend, along with Nazdreg, the new Warboss, the Mek, the Boyz, the Warbikers and the Trukk. The bommer kit is not on that list. If you want to try the detachment on release you’re building the same box people were building in 2012, and if yours came off a second-hand shelf you should probably check it still has both wings.
