The NERF Begins: 9th Edition 40k Aircraft & Fly Keyword

By Wesley Floyd | June 26th, 2020 | Categories: 40k News & Articles, 9th Edition 40k, Games Workshop, Tabletop Gaming News & Rumors, Warhammer Community

Don’t miss the big rules changes that GW just mentioned are coming to 9th Edition Warhammer 40k for Fly and Aircraft that are pretty spicy compared to 8th.

Warhammer Community has been steadily dropping 9th Edition rules teasers over the past few weeks. Of everything we’ve seen, some of the biggest changes might be to units with the Aircraft and Fly keywords. Here’s everything on those units in the new Edition.

Big Rules Changes: 9th Edition 40k Aircraft & Fly Keyword

Beginning with Aircraft, here is everything we saw earlier:

Your Flyers will soon be coming and going as they please – no more bugging out or flying off into the sunset! If it leaves the battlefield, a Flyer can just swoop around to return later in the battle and deliver a murderous strafing run. In the new edition, the danger zone is very much ON the battlefield, right where it belongs!

So here’s the way everything works. If you fly off the board, it goes into Strategic Reserves, later in the game, you can drop your aircraft back down 9″ away anywhere on the board. The only stipulation is that you can’t charge with it later in that turn (but how often do gunships want to charge something, so who cares).

Also, GW confirmed you will not have to pay any CP to put your Aircraft into reserves either.

Aircraft Ignore What’s Happening on the Ground

Another key feature of the new rules for Flyers is how they interact with units on the ground. As aircraft are typically soaring overhead and not skimming along the ground, they don’t interfere with them or hinder their movement in any way. After all, a Flyer’s base is only there to help keep it aloft! Here are the highlights of how this works…

Basically, unless you have a flying model, there’s no interaction between units on the ground and aircraft. Models can move over the base, they can sit in the 1″ engagement range (normally melee), etc. The only time that you wouldn’t ignore some of these rules is if you have something like a winged Hive Tyrant or Smash Captain heroically intervening.

GW Hands Out Aircraft Keyword To These Units

You might have noticed that Aircraft is a brand new keyword. In the back of the rulebook, there’s a page dedicated to showing which flying units have the Aircraft keyword so there’s no confusion. However, we did notice that GW did not say that any of these units would have the Fly keyword, and that the entirely of Tyranids, and other units with the Fly keyword were omitted from this list…

Do Aircraft “Fly” in 9th Edition?

Tyranids are a faction of all bio-engineered horrors but they still have units that use flight stands just like an aircraft would. While it makes sense that the Harpy isn’t technically an aircraft, it still shares the same effect/footprint in-game currently. Could it be that niche units like the Harpy won’t be able to leave the board and come back on?

Will they still be chargeable despite having a flight stand? It’ll be interesting if GW has another ruleset put aside for niche units like this, maybe it’s just as simple as having keyword Fly, and not being classified as an Aircraft?

Fly Has Changed A Lot Now!

After the recent rules reveal, this is an extremely important question. In the middle of a Tau Faction Focus, from WHC, there was a small quote showing a stark change in the way Flyers work:

The largest challenge for the T’au Empire in the new edition is the change to the Fly keyword. It no longer offers units the ability to Fall Back and shoot, which means you need to put extra effort into screening enemy charges and preventing your critical shooting units from being engaged in combat.

Flyers in particular took a heavy NERF losing the ability to be able to fall back and shoot. If a Tau Battlesuit unit did get charged, their saving grace was that they could at least fall back and fire. However, with that gone, screens are going to become even more paramount across all armies it seems. For Vehicles (which can fire in close combat) and also have the FLY keyword, it will probably just be better for them to stay locked into melee combat so they can at least fire their non-blast weaponry.

In the grand scheme of things, it seems like this was a way to give melee armies a slight edge. Historically, 40k has always favored more shooting armies than melee ones. With that said, the reward for a melee army eating rounds until they successfully charge will be that the enemy will have to pick between falling back to get away or staying to fight and possibly lose the unit.

Maybe there is something to this new Edition of 40k after all?

What do you think the biggest change to 9th Edition is 40k rules is so far- will Aircraft also have the Fly keyword? Or will they be two separate entities, that seem to already do two different things?