Luckily for us, while the right side of a cockpit may have prevented useful planes from being flyable, there were apparently tons of images of cockpits for the lerche, etc. Gotta keep up standards!
Related to SoW, I personally always wondered why not have some planes simply have "player as PILOT" as the paradigm. Meaning that the other positions simply do not matter. Better to have a % of the planes with only cockpits (and bombadiers for level bombers) done at the high level required, and have the gunners, etc be AI.
More flyable planes with less work.