A cleaner way in
Skydex is wings-first. Open it and the first screen is a storefront: a big Take off, a choice of drone or gull, links out to the flying-spots map and the radio hub, and not much else. That is deliberate — the first click should lead somewhere, not ask you to read a menu.
The trouble was that the flight cockpit did not know the game had not started yet. The heads-up display — altitude and speed, the weather-and-clock line, the minimap in the corner, and the whole rail of round buttons down the side for your collection, your moments, your career, races, your fleet, panoramas — all of it rendered the moment the flight world existed, which is immediately. So the welcome screen came up wearing a full cockpit it had no use for, and those fixed buttons sat right on top of the things the welcome screen actually wanted to show you.
On a phone it was worse: the on-screen joystick and the action cluster showed up too, over a screen where there was nothing yet to steer.
The fix
There is now a single, honest gate. None of the flight interface — instruments, minimap, the button rail, the mobile joystick and actions — draws until you have actually engaged: clicked into flight on desktop, or tapped in on touch. Before that, the welcome screen has the frame to itself. The instant you take off, the cockpit is there, exactly as before.
Two things stay put on purpose: the radio mini-player and the walkie-talkie. Those are not flight instruments — they carry sound. If they blinked out every time you hit Esc to pause, your music would stop and your voice channel would drop mid-sentence. So they keep running underneath the pause screen, while everything visual that belongs to flying steps out of the way.
Why bother
A welcome screen is the one screen almost everyone sees and a lot of people judge the whole thing on. If it looks like a busy dashboard with buttons overlapping the copy, it reads as broken before anyone has flown a metre. Getting out of the player's way until they have chosen to fly is a small change in code and a large one in first impression.
Same behaviour on desktop and on mobile, which — given how many people meet a browser game on a phone first — was the point.