For many moons now, the Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog has sat at the top of our best joysticks guide , staring down threateningly at the plastic-based options below. It's quite possibly one of the most substantial bits of hardware we've ever tested when it comes to build quality and delivers a substantial dose of realism—for a slightly eye-watering $550. Thrustmaster has been beavering away on a new flight stick base design, however, and it calls it the AVA.
That stands for Advanced Versatile Aviation, and it's essentially a modular base for Thrustmaster's future flight sticks. You can buy it as a separate unit, or you can choose to buy it as part of the AVA FA18 Super Hornet flight stick bundle, as I have in front of me here. That gets you the fancy new AVA base, a 1:1 scale replica of the grip and stick controls from the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18C Hornet , an offset adapter, and a large baseplate to hold it stable on your desk.
All told, the whole package will cost you $600 / £500 , which is no small amount of change—particularly when you factor in that it doesn't come with a dedicated throttle control, like the HOTAS Warthog. Still, we'll get to that in a moment. What you'll notice most when pulling all of these components from their respective boxes is the sheer heft.
The AVA base itself appears to have the density of a small star and feels something like holding a small, angular bowling ball. Looking at the engineering going on inside though, it's really no surprise. Ev.