Quote:
Originally Posted by KG26_Alpha
Historically the He111 Ju88 crews flew the aircraft if the pilot was wounded/killed.
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This wasn't unheard of for any plane where other crew members could reach the pilot.
The only problem was that few crewmen had any piloting skill, and almost none were likely to have had experience piloting a heavy, multi-engined plane under combat conditions.
For example, in the USAAF aviation cadets who failed to complete primary or secondary flight training were often sent to flight engineer, navigator, or bombardier school.
Very rarely, you'd have a private pilot who somehow didn't qualify for pilot training in the military (mostly due to educational requirements), but who was still qualified for some other crew position.
Ideally, IL2 would allow different crewmen to have different skill areas, so you could have experienced gunners who are poor pilots or bombardiers, or some other combination.
Older combat flight sims which specifically focused on heavy bomber operations would often give you the ability to assign different crew to different positions in the plane as sort of "3rd person" plane commander, and give the different crewmen different skill sets. You could play as any crew member, and change positions as the various crewmen died or were too badly injured to fight.