I just started flying myself and am loving it. I recommend watching a couple of youtube jet tutorials and practicing in some flight practice servers before making a public spectacle of yourself.
Here is a long random collection of my thoughts and tips from videos.
I managed to cheese my way to flares and most of the way to heat seekers somehow before I really knew how to fly; they are both really early unlocks points wise.
Heatseekers are not that good, as many pilots will be running flares, stealth, or ECM, and you can tank 1 missile hit at full health anyways.
In dogfights, you generally want to wait till you have a good shot lined up then open up with the main guns, and hopefully disable/kill in 1 burst. The heatseekers will alert your presence, and the enemy will start flying more evasively, making your life that much harder.
If you can, put yourself into 3rd person view to help see more until you need to aim at the enemy.
When you get it, air radar is really good for chasing jets and getting them off your tail, as well as for identifying other possible targets/threats. If you don't have air radar, zoom out your minimap, and blow it up if you want to see in more detail. Make sure to spot everything you see in addition to spamming spot on the ground for possible enemies. Also pay special attention to when the enemy jets become occupied(the empty jet icons disappear from the map).
When I find that I'm getting tailed, I basically constantly turn as tightly as I can until hopefully the guy overshoots or loses track of me, which I'll know from the air radar, and then pull in behind him.
When you want to make a tight turn quickly, you should decelerate into your turns and accelerate out with afterburners.
I usually stay to the outside of the map, and look for enemy jets to get behind. Once you are behind someone, they are gonna have a really hard time shaking you, especially with the air radar.
If I am confident that there are no enemy jets or they are far away, then I'll go chase down a helicopter or ground targets before returning to looking for jets again.
I run rocket pods most of the time, and a full salvo of rocket pods and a few shots from the main cannons will usually at least disable a tank.
A lot of people give jet pilots flak for focusing on dog fights, but you have to in order to stay alive, so pay a lot of attention to the enemy jets, and engage them asap. This will frustrate a lot of less skilled/persistent pilots, and hopefully you can spend more time going after tanks and helicopters.
Luckily I have found that many jet pilots are not very good right now, so get cracking before there are a lot of pros that can smoke you at their leisure.
I set my game and mouse sensitivity to max when I fly, and that kind of makes the guided missile unusable, but rocket pods are fine really. I see no need to go to guided unless you're in Touch Football with no 3d spotting.
Leave the centurion/phalanx or pantsir wide bearth if they are manned. Although, If the base is unguarded, then go ahead and spawn kill some jets/helis or steal one of their jets or their helicopter.
The tunguska and lav-ad are a PITA. You should only try to catch it when it's otherwise occupied or somehow oblivious of you. I usually keep my distance from mobile AA as much as possible, which sucks since they can cover a very long range.
Flying jets is not that hard, although surviving, aiming, and gaining situational awareness require practice, this is the same with the helicopters.
The helicopters get much better ground effectiveness in return for being easier to take down. If you really want to ground pound, then the helicopters should probably be your go to air vehicles.
I really want to pilot helicopters more, but a backseat repairman or a good gunner w/ unlocks is necessary, and you have to dodge missile locks constantly any time you are remotely close to the action. It's a bit too much for me
, at least they're easy to land when they're disabled lol.
There's a another huge problem with helicopter balance that, while not so big now, is gonna blow up IMO. Once more people have CITV for the tanks, it's gonna be much harder to be effective in a helicopters. I think it'll eventually boil down to a ECM + tv guided missiles vs. CITV + guided shells deadlock.
In a jet, you can just fly above the mess, and it feels like a majority of tracking missiles can be dodged without much trouble. Although jets have their own problem of having to engage enemy jets constantly, but I find this fun...
For Touch Football mode flying:
The air radar becomes nearly indispensable.
Use free look frequently.
Land and repair before you get disabled, as there is no vehicle regeneration. May want to switch to extinguishers.
It is super hard to land a disabled jet. I've done it once(takes lots of luck) out of probably around 10 tries.
The plus to HC is that the good pilots are probably not going to be there. No 3d spotting cuts jet effectiveness severely on ground targets, and no 3rd person view makes spotting tracking jets/helis by eye harder. The lack of vehicle regen also hits jets harder than any other vehicle.
It sounds pretty bad, but the lesser air threat will make surviving in a non training server less stressful while you gain your footing in the sky.
Random map advice(mostly for CQ):
On Noshahr(spelling?) canal, don't even bother flying a jet on the Russian side, unless your team absolutely needs an attack chopper destroyed. On American side, if you have the fixed AA backing you, then it's all easy pickings. Don't try to do any loops going vertically up, you'll stall into low the sky ceiling.
If you approach from behind mountains, the fixed AA on Firestorm get short notice when you attempt to hit their base.
The Kharg fixed AAs have good range, and if the Mobile AA decides to camp on the mountain, it can be a hassle to get around. The US carrier has no AA though, and can be attacked fairly easily, because the centurion is usually looking at the battlefield instead of the carrier. The RU side with the tunguska and closely placed pantsir seems to have more protection.
Mountains are your friends for hiding behind and dodging locks.Though I have encountered gangs of stinger equipped engineers tactical loitering on mountain tops so YMMV...
Flying in a straight line or making slow/easy maneuvers will make you very easy to hit in a dogfight.
And finally, don't be afraid of changing your load out to fit the situation.
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TL;DR: Be persistent, practice, and hope that the enemy pilot isn't better than you are.