A dozen tabs, and only five of them matter before your first flight. Here they are in sequence, with the reason each has to come before the next.
Open Betaflight for the first time and the interface does not help you. Twelve tabs down the left, most of them full of numbers you have no basis to change, none of them labelled "start here".
For a first flight you need five of them, and the order is not the order they appear in. Each step below makes the next one readable — do them out of sequence and you end up staring at a receiver tab that shows nothing, unable to tell whether the problem is the wiring, the port, or the protocol.
Propellers stay off for all of this.
The flight controller has several serial ports. You soldered the receiver to one of them. Betaflight has no way to know which, so you tell it: find the UART your receiver is wired to and turn on serial receiver for that row.
This is first because nothing downstream works without it. A receiver on an unconfigured port is electrically fine and invisible to the software.
Now set the protocol your receiver speaks, then move the sticks. Four bars should move, and they should move in a way you can predict: throttle up raises one, roll right moves another.
If nothing moves, you have a short list of suspects — the port you just set, the protocol you just chose, the solder joints, or a receiver that never bound. That short list is the whole reason this step comes before the rest.
Check the direction of each channel here too. A reversed channel is trivial to fix in your transmitter and extremely unpleasant to discover in the air.
Betaflight shows a three-dimensional model of the aircraft. Tilt the real one and the model should tilt the same way.
If it does not, the flight controller is mounted at an angle the software does not know about, and you correct it here with a yaw offset — 90, 180 or 270 degrees, depending on how the board sits in your frame.
Get this wrong and the aircraft will fly. It will simply fly sideways relative to your inputs, and it will do it the instant it leaves the ground. This is the most common cause of a first flight that ends in two seconds.
Arming is the switch that makes the motors live. Assign it to a physical switch on your transmitter, never to a stick position, and make sure you know which way is off.
Add an angle or horizon mode on another switch if you want a self-levelling fallback while learning. Acro — no self-levelling — is where FPV flying ends up, but it is not where you should have your first flight.
Betaflight refuses to arm when something is unsafe, and it tells you why in the arming flags. Read them rather than working around them. "Arming disabled" is the software declining to hand you a live aircraft for a reason it can name.
This is the step beginners skip and the one that decides what a lost link costs.
Radio links drop. It happens from range, from interference, from a battery that sagged, from a receiver antenna that got cut by a propeller. What the aircraft does in that second is entirely determined by what you set here.
The default behaviour you want on a first build is to cut the motors. The aircraft drops where it is. That sounds bad until you consider the alternative — an aircraft at full throttle with nobody controlling it, heading away from you into whatever is in that direction.
Set it. Then test it, on the ground, propellers off, by turning the transmitter off and confirming the motors stop.
Those five get you to a first hover. The rest of Betaflight is tuning and instrumentation, and none of it is urgent:
A fair number of pilots never touch PID tuning at all, and fly well. Starting there — before the aircraft has flown — is a way of spending an evening on the wrong problem.
Notice what the order is doing. Each step makes the next one diagnosable. Ports before receiver, so a dead receiver tab has four suspects instead of ten. Orientation before arming, so the aircraft's first movement is the one you asked for. Failsafe before flight, because the alternative is finding out what it does by losing an aircraft.
It is the same logic as the build order. Sequence is how you keep the number of things that can be wrong small enough to reason about.
Where this comes from. FPV Drone Essentials covers binding and receiver configuration at pages 500 to 538 — the signal path from transmitter to flight controller at 500, the wireless binding at 501, and the wired side at 511. The Betaflight appendix runs from 662 to 744 and is organised tab by tab: getting started at 662, ports 673, configuration 676, power and battery 686, failsafe 690, PID tuning 698, receiver 710, modes 718, VTX 730 and blackbox 732. It is written to be used with the software open rather than read through.