Sometimes you can get a PK with a lucky shot from your .303s on a head on, but the damage to the actual aiframe might be minimal. In such a case and if you're opponent has a well trimmed aircraft, it might take as much as 5-10 minutes (depending on altitude) for the aircraft to crash.
Making people wait on a screen for 10 minutes in multiplayer would not go down well with most (example, Rise of Flight multiplayer where you can also spectate and it still gets tedious to wait, imagine staring at a blank screen).
It depends on the scenario i think. For a co-op/non-respawning game mode, knock yourself out. In a DF/persistent server with respawns though, we don't simulate one pilot, as much as we simulate a series of sorties by possibly different pilots during the course of the battle. It would make sense to scramble additional fighters when you lose contact with the previous flight and since we can't have 200 people per side to enforce a 1 death per mission rule, the same guys respawn in a new aircraft to simulate the next batch of reinforcements. In that case, having to wait for the aircraft to impact the ground would be like saying "we can't take off until the previous flight are all dead".
From a realism standpoint neither one makes too much sense, so we compromise. If we want to simulate a single mission and a single pilot it's co-ops, if we want to simulate a series of sorties it's DF and there's different kinds of "death penalties" that work well with each one.
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