FA Off, or Flight Assist Off, is the mode in Elite Dangerous where your ship does not correct any momentum (angular or linear) that you have, except for imposin

FA Off, or Flight Assist Off, is the mode in Elite Dangerous where your ship does not correct any momentum (angular or linear) that you have, except for imposing speed limits. In this mode, you will be using 6 strafe thrusts and 6 turning controls, and it's entirely up to you to use them to cancel momentum if you want to stand still or fly in a controlled direction. It is absolutely incredible to play like this, and very hard but rewarding. It can be essential for high level combat, and there's an entire community of hooners (sp?) that fly among narrow spaces between mountains doing incredible maneuvers. They use extra things like opening the cargo hatch or landing gear as aerobrakes (lower ship speed limit). Many "normal" pilots will enable and disable Flight Assist situationally, mostly to gain extra turning speed during FA OFF. It's worth searching youtube for some related videos. Unfortunately for mouse/keyboard users like me there's a couple of things in the control scheme that conspire to make it harder to use than it could be. Still, the first time I landed my Cutter (a massive ship with brutal inertia) in a rotating station with FA OFF, I felt like the king of the world. Note that you don't need FA OFF to do strafing in all directions. I do it all the time. However with FA ON, the ship will counter your strafes to correct the ship's motion into the forward/back axis. Strafes in FA OFF are more powerful and can let your ship move at top speed in any direction while facing any other direction, but you only really need that for tight flight maneuvers.