Most of us think of insect antennae as super-sensitive olfactory organs, or twitchy tactile projections. Recent findings, however, suggest a new role for insect antennae: providing feedback on the insect's orientation during flight.The visual system and optic flow are often implicated as the major sensory input to insect flight, but over the past few years, the emerging importance of the antennae during flight has been demonstrated again and again. While insects usually hold their antennae close to their heads, flying insects will move their antennae to face forward. Damaging an insect's antennae impairs its ability to control flight speed. In moths, the antennae are also important for sensing body orientation and position, and the sensory neurons associated with the antennae are specialized for detecting body rotation. Chopping off the ends of a moth's antennae reduces its ability to steer. Despite numerous studies, how the sensory information provided by antennal deformations is incorporated into flight behavior remains a black box. Armin Hinterwith and his colleagues at the University of Washington, veterans of the study of hawkmoth flight, decided to manipulate the moth's antennae to determine the locomotor consequences of antennal deflection.To address this question, Hinterwith and his team designed tiny, wireless muscle stimulator control boards that could be attached to a moth's abdomen. These stimulators acted on the muscles at the base of the left antenna during free flight. Muscle stimulation caused the moth's antenna to deflect backwards, replicating the air-induced deflection a moth's antennae might experience if they were perturbed during flight in nature. For instance, if a moth were forced by an external disturbance to pitch downwards, its antennae could well be pushed backwards. A disturbance causing the moth to yaw left or right, or to roll about its longitudinal axis, might cause different antennal deflections. The neurons at the base of the antenna responded to the deflection, demonstrating the moth's ability to receive mechanosensory information from the antennae.Finally, Hinterwith and his colleagues used high-speed videos of free-flying moths to reveal any changes in flight during and after antennal deflection, yielding insight into the specific role of antennae in altering flight. As the antenna was deflected, Hinterwith found common changes in the moths' flight paths. The moths would move their abdomens, pitching the front of their bodies up. This pitch response is exactly what Hinterwith and his colleagues expected if the antennae were acting as part of a pitch-stabilizing control system. Insect body orientation, and body pitch in particular, is inherently unstable. By combining sensory information from the visual system and antennal mechanosensation, the moths can rapidly correct their flight after a perturbation.Hinterwith and his colleagues suggest that the complex mechanosensory feedback provided by the antennae is just one system of many that is used to control flight behavior. The ability to manipulate these systems during free flight may eventually reveal how the antennae's multiple senses combine to contribute to insect behavior. But given the tremendous sensory contribution of these smelling, touching, orienting structures, the revelation may take a while.