Yeah, nothing like free fall...
Also how about chutes being damaged, so they don't work that well ?

Exactly!!!

Best to have scaleable difficulty levels for bailouts then. The arcade players can have their one-button-does-it-all and the simmers can jettison the canopy, unplug everything and go over the side, freefall and then pull their ripchord. :cool:

I've been playing Half-Life 2 recently and really appreciate the '100% first person view' theme - you only get to see your face on the cover of the box! So I'd like to see a completely first-person bale-out sequence. But this could be made into an option quite easily, to select third- or first-person view, I think.

I think: have a completely seperate command for "Tell crew to bale out".
But every crewman (AI or human) should make their own decision to bale out. The AI shouldn't bale when the aircraft is too low for them to survive, for example. And they should bale out on their own initiative in some circumstances.

I don't know if it's more realistic to use multiple keypresses or one keypress to trigger your own bale-out. Yes in real life you need to open canopy, disconnect oxygen and harness etc and then force yourself out of the aeroplane, but in real life (I assume) the pilot/crew is thoroughly drilled so that it's automatic. There should always be an option to use a single keypress to bale out. And if multiple keypresses are also available, there should be optional tool-tip type tips (there's a tongue-twister!) telling the player which key to press next.

I'd really like the AI not to suicide by jumping from 30 ft., and I'd like them also not to opt for a crash landing in a forest...

Of course, there are historical examples of pilots doing just that... so it should happen some times (randomisation?)

As for 1st person sequences: the blackout combined with prerecorded audio used in Steel Fury: Kharkov 1942 works quite well, and would likely be a good model to use.

...and on the other hand they happily descend, engine dead, towards a nearest forest:grin:.

I am not a speed typist. I "hunt and peck." When you consider how fast a human being can do things in a crisis (I once fell asleep behind the wheel of a car while driving on a freeway late at night---I was waked by the bumping of the tires on the dirt edge of the road, I saw water dead ahead [the car was speeding towards a stream], without even thinking I spun the wheel to the left, the car flew off the dirt right before it would have zoomed over the stream and blown up hitting the opposite bank), I think reducing them to key procedure is ridiculous. Some things can't be simulated without full integration of the human being into the sim. I'd wager a person whose fuel tank is belching flames right in front of him would bang has palm on the belt release, slam the hood release above him, tear out oxy tube and RT cable, and swing the airplane upside down to bail in less time than it would take for a person to read these words. Granted it would be fun to get snagged by an RT lead or get your boot stuck, or other such perfectly realistic contingencies, but honestly....

David Cronenberg anticipated full integration in his film "eXistenZ" (1999):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/

Ya, the Cronenberg movie brings the idea of immersion to a whole new level (LOL)...

And for the most part I don't really care how the bail-out procedure is handled... If their going to include the details of "bailing-out" into the game I'm more interested in what happens to the body before & after bailing out...stuff like: inertia making it impossible to jump-out of a spinning aeroplane (or maybe blacking-out), or the pilot getting hit by his own tail after jumping, or the pilot getting splattered by a fighter following too closely behind... but I don't really care about how many buttons I have to push... its all about surviving the flight to collect my points.