I'm throwing my part in:
Aeroplanes
Practice the Basics… again Even if you are a vet of BF42 and BFV, you are going to need a little freshening of your senses when it comes to planes. Lots of new features are included in the cockpits of these new planes. Practice flying around offline and learning your new features like afterburners (shift), flares (x), and vertical thrust (s on F35’s). The weapons are also greatly changed; the missiles require 3 seconds of locking to produce a lock-on. Heat seeking missiles are really only effective when you are right on the tail of a plane or heli that isn’t changing direction. Bomb’s open up green triangle highlights around ground units, extremely helpful in locating targets, even when you are out of bombs and want to release some mg fire. Speaking of which, you’ll notice a visible drop in the tracers of your mg after however so many feet. It shouldn’t really concern you since you won’t usually be shooting that far anyway.
Quick runs, refill the guns This is especially true for bombing runs. Since, depending on your aircraft, you only have enough bombs for one or two runs, be sure to head right back to your friendly airbase and restock on ammo… always! Don’t resort to using your lesser mg to take out hostiles when you have an airstrip a short afterburners distance away. Bombs are basically handled the same way, it takes practice but after a while you’ll be able to take everything out in the first person fine.
OMGmissile headed this way Countermeasures are necessary for you to stay alive. I don’t just mean your flares, which are quite useful, but your general flight path as well. Never fly straight. Heat seeking missiles have the highest likely hood of hitting you if you fly straight. Change your movements around, use your afterburner,
Be unpredictable! This will help you avoid AA rounds as well as being bbq’ed by a heat seeker.
The Downward Stale This is one of the best ways I found to make use of the TVMs on planes. I’ve found that under usual circumstances, the second person in a plane is absolutely worthless. The plane is a much too fast moving platform for the TVM’s to hit anything. I’ve spent 10 minutes as the second guy without killing anyone. However, as started by Knyte before, TVM’s are devastating. So I developed the following method for using them:
Basically you need to approach the enemy from as high as you possibly can. Then point your plane straight down towards the area you want to target. It helps if you are in bomb mode so you can check to see if there are any actual vehicles down there. As you point your plane downward, hit backwards throttle all the way. You should descend quite slowly, allowing your passenger time to waste away a couple TVM’s at the enemy. If your passenger bails, you may even be able to switch spots and fire one yourself. Just remember to pull up soon enough! Practice it a couple of times without a gunner first of course. And remember, you’re a pretty easy target while you are hovering in the air, so make sure there isn’t any enemy threat around you.
Heres a terrific mspaint job to loosely show you what I mean…