Every good sky fighter knows that the sky is not the limit. It's acknowledged, conscientiously or sub conscientiously, in the way you fly just a bit closer together than necessary in a fight or allow the enemy just a moment to catch their balance on a skimmer before attacking. Because when you're thirty thousand feet above the clouds and who knows how far away from the closest terra it's not the sky you're worried about.
They hide it very well, they all charge fearlessly into the sky, eyes only on the next challenge and thoughts only on the sky, because that is what they were trained to do. They don't know how to anything else. And it is never spoken about, there is only one Sky Knight per squadron and one Elite fighter per Talon fleet. What would squadies, safe behind their leader and with their long range weapons, know about bleeding into the sky and having your vision suddenly go blurry and sideways and knowing, like you have never known something else in your life, that there is nothing but the sky around you.
And Aerrow can vividly remember one teacher from the Sky Knight Academy. She was small, dark haired, always wore her armor, and flinty eyed with a haughty accent. Her name was lost admits a haze of jokes made at her expense but her words still rang true and crystal clear. He could remember every barked word even years later.
She would yell the same speech at the cocky new recruits every year. "I'm am not here to play around, if you can not take my class seriously you will leave the Academy IMMEDIATELY! When you are in a sky battle and end up somewhere other than sitting on your skimmer, and you will end up like this, you need to be able to find something else to stand on POST HASTE! It is my job to teach you how to find these alternative standing objects, because when you are in the sky and you enter a freefall with no known end you WILL DIE! You can not always trust your squadron to catch you. You will hear that the sky is not the limit, that much is true, but you need to learn how not to hit all the other limits out there!"
All the new recruits would laugh at her, but what did they know? As soon as they got on an actual battle field they learned what she had been trying to teach them all along, what every Sky Knight has known for centuries.
The sky is not the limit, the ground is.