4.11 - AI debugging

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by RegRag1977

Yes they did though few of them survived to tell: sometimes they prefered to stay in a burning/hard smoking aircraft rather than to bail out above enemy controlled areas. Especially on eastern front (for obvious reasons), they would try to join friendly territory at all costs.

I can think of other obvious situations where a fighter pilot would stay with his plane if it was on fire:

1) Too low to bail out. The pilot would ride the plane down and try to crash land/ditch.

2) Close enough to base/smooth ground to possibly make an emergency landing. This option has claimed a lot of real life pilots over the years, since sometimes the choice to try to make an emergency landing rather than immediately bail out is the wrong one.

3) Over water, but close enough to land to possibly bail out or crash land on dry ground. Similar to the situation above, but particularly applicable when flying over shark-infested or extremely cold waters, where falling into the water was almost certain death.

4) "Doomed hero." Pilot is mortally wounded and/or plane is in too bad a condition to get back to base, but the pilot can still complete a vital mission by sticking with the plane until the very end. Very rare, but it did happen. A slightly more common scenario is where the pilot sticks with his plane long enough that it won't crash onto a friendly populated area.

5) Stubbornness. As long as the fire isn't burning him, a pilot might try to deal with smoke or fire rather than bailing out.

Many fighters carried fire extinguishers in the cockpits, and pilots could try to blow smoke out of the cockpit by slightly opening the canopy. The wind rushing over the gap created a partial vacuum which could suck the smoke out. They could also try to extinguish fires by going into long, hard dives, shutting down the engine, or shutting off damaged fuel tanks, which sometimes worked.