Airkill

An airkill or airfrag, sometimes also called midair and abbreviated as MA, is a kill that is performed on someone who is in the air. In gamemodes that make guns or force powers available, a midair kill can be performed with one of the players on the ground, whereas gamemodes that restrict players to sabers require both players to be in the air for an airkill to happen. This makes airkills or midairs especially hard to perform as it requires a lot of accuracy and a great sense of timing. Airkills enjoy a priviledged status in the competitive community and are, next to multikills, the most frequent kills to feature in fragmovies.

Types of Airkills

There are two general types of airkills for saber-only gametypes: high and low airkills. Low airkills are kills performed with at least one of the players having made a low or mid-range jump, either in height or length. Those types of kills tend to happen most often with one player trying to make his escape through the air, most often with a simple backflip, with the other one having predicted this to happen and scoring a frag while chasing him in the air. High airkills are the ones that feature both players making high-range jumps, with the best high airkills happening when both players meet at the maximum height of a force jump. Although high airkills tend to be generally valued more than low ones, what really determines the value of an airkill is the context of the kill combined with the relative angle and speed of the impact.

For gametypes that feature guns or force powers, there are two basic types of airkills as well: grounded and flying airkills. The former occurs with one of the players staying on the ground, while the other gets killed in midair; the latter occurs when the attacking player fires a shot while being in the middle of a jump or fall and kills his opponent in midair. Since the distance and relative velocity of the two players can differ even more radically as it is the case with saber-only gametypes, the context that the kill is performed in is going to weigh even more on the value of the kill, with the greater the distance and speed difference resulting in generally more impressive kills.

Performance

Airkills require a set of skills to perform that generally take a long time to acquire. In both sabering as well as gunning gametypes, the accuracy of one's shot as well as one's ability to predict the movement of the opponent are quintessential for performing airkills. For guns, the ability to accurately predict the trajectory of shots or projectiles for non-hitscan weapons like the Imperial Heavy Repeater or the Rocket Launcher are very important skills for the performance of airkills. For saber-only gametypes, the player is required to master a variety of jumping skills, like performing strafe or high jumps with great accuracy and control; ontop of that, the timing of swings and the impact certain swings can have on the movement of the player and thus the speed of his jumps are critical skills to master.

Although airkills are more common in gametypes that feature guns and have been around since the dawn of FPS games, they have only recently become very widespread in saber-only gametypes, with most players having acquired the skills necessary to perform basic airkills.

Early pioneers of sabering styles that heavily relied on airkills were players like o³Dark, who cultivated a midair-heavy style of playing under clan Zedi in early 2004, or Master Ping aka Masta, who started out working on midairs outside of the British and ESL communities in 2004. On the American side, Master DarkStar and [Ki]Lotusfire were known for their accurate midairs. EviLWindu aka zentur1o first developed a style that heavily relied on performing airkills with a staff and was one of the most successful competitive players to utilize that kind of play. Midairs became more popular when the British team Ozone joined the ESL in late 2005 and used styles that heavily relied on making high jumps. Players like Jedi Sentinel's Minneyar and Ozone's Dark perfected the execution of airkills and Ping popularized them through his fragmovie Revelation4. Some of the more recent players that have adopted airkill-centric playstyles are Vintage's Afinity.

Aerial or Airkill?

Although airkills designate kills performed with at least one player in the air, the term midair is used to denote both kills as well as hits performed in the air. So although a midair hit can lead to an airkill and is sometimes used to refer to one, an airkill necessitates a hit performed in midair. The somewhat less common term 'aerial' on the other hand denotes swings performed in midair and includes the widely popular right swing short forward jump. So an aerial swing can lead to a midair hit, which can become an airkill/midair kill under certain circumstances.

Comparison

Aim	Wiggle aka Poke
P!ng performing a clean aimed red swing in slow motion during an official ESL 1v1 match against aXiom][Dureal sometime in 2004, as seen in the fragvideo Revelation 2.	A heavy wiggle performed by an ESL player in the finals of the Jedi Academy 3on3 Saber Cup 2010 as can be seen on Youtube.
An aimed yellow swing performed by P!ng in an official ESL 1v1 game against #nL.cube in 2005, as can be seen in the fragvideo Revelation 2. Yellow swings are more difficult to aim due to their speed.	Wiggle as seen from the perspective of the player doing the wiggling. This was taken from the final match of the ESL 2vs2 Late Night Cup 2012, performed by the player network_^rzr!.