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 still 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 frequently tend to happen when one player tries to make his escape through the air, most often with a simple backflip, with the other one predicting the escape and attacking him as he is making the jump. 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 example, a high airkill where both players stand in close proximity to one another and merely jump as high as possible, with one of them getting a hit in, are not deemed very interesting.
For gametypes that feature guns or force powers, there are two basic types of airkills as well: airborne and grounded airkills. The latter occurs with one of the players standing on the ground, while the other gets shot in midair; the former occurs when the attacking player fires a shot while being himself in midair and kills his jumping or falling opponent. Since the distance and relative velocity of the two players can differ even more radically compared to saber-only gametypes, the context that the kill is performed in is going to weigh even more on the aesthetic value of it, with the greater the distance and speed difference between the players, the generally more impressive the kill.
Performance
Airkills require a set of skills to perform that usually 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, whereas 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 way certain swings can impact the movement of the player and thus the speed of his jumps are things one has to master to become good at hitting others in midair.
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 more widespread in saber-only gametypes, with most current players having acquired the skills necessary to perform even more advanced airkills.
Early pioneers of sabering styles that heavily relied on airkills were players like o³Dark, who cultivated a midair-heavy style of playing back as early as February 2004, or Master Ping aka Masta, who started out working on midairs outside of the British and ESL communities in late 2004. On the American side, Master DarkStar and [Ki]Lotusfire were also 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 a playstyle that heavily relied on making high jumps. Players like Jedi Sentinel's Minneyar and Ozone's Dark perfected the execution of airkills in early 2006, and Ping popularized them through his fragmovie Revelation 4. Some of the more recent players that have adopted airkill-centric playstyles are Vintage's afiNity amongst others.
Airkill or Aerial?
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 with a short forward hop. So an aerial swing can lead to a midair hit, which can become an airkill/midair kill under certain circumstances.