These guys terrorize the entire map, especially when all 3 planes are piloted by aces. I find it very difficult to dogfight them because they either know how to fight or they do the thing where you fly straight and switch seats to the gunner and hose the attacking plane down. The AA guns have weak range, low bullet velocity and are prone to getting killed off the turret. Unless your name is Ravic you can’t really shoot the pilot out. I haven’t tried the aa rocket gun but I don’t imagine its any good, the at certainty ain’t. Oh and if you manage to shoot them down they respawn quick
AA guns are an aquired practice and, yes, are vulnerable. LMGs like the MG1917 work well against planes, though are tricky to take down fighters with. The Burton LMR in incendiary mode is good.
It can take more than one person to take down a plane just as it takes more than one to take down a tank. They are indeed good battlefield assets.
Sometimes just ignoring the planes is the way to go. Concentrate on the ground battle. If they have their ‘best players’ in the air, they will often lose the ground battle.
Burton LMR load fire rounds and use a crate to resupply once it comes in low to strafe light it up, If you can spawn the mobile AA its a decent counter as it can move and the gunner isnt sitting exposed.
With better planes.
Burton is garbage, any decent pilot won’t strafe low enough to crash from a wing hit and you’re basically beaming down from the enterprise when firing fire bullets seriously they’re very easy to trace back to the source. Use an AA rocket or dog fighter fighter. It has a speed boost that can overtake any other plane in circles. I prefer the bomber killer since it can murk heavy bombers in one strafe with rockets and heal off damage from back gunners and untimely wing disables automatically, but you don’t get the speed boost.
This may seem like a meme at first but it’s true.
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OP,
The best way to take out other planes is with a plane of your own - preferably a fighter. Fight fire with fire. If there’s one or two in the air trying to farm infantry (what most pilots do) you can dogfight both of them one after the other.
As a dogfighter fighter main, I’ve noticed that most of the time enemy pilots will be too engrossed in farming infantry and upping their KD to be bothered to dogfight you, so you effectively “sneak” up behind them and catch them off guard. The most important part about dogfighting is that you should keep tailing your enemy from behind and never letting them out of your sight until they’re downed or you’re downed.
If an attack plane pilot pulls the old “switch to back seat gunner” tactic, immediately disengage and flee (but not too far) because they will eventually have to switch back to the pilot seat if they want to survive and not crash into the ground.
There is a lot I could say about this, i’ll try to keep it short. I fly a lot weather it’s by myself or someone in the back seat “a good backseat gunner will make flying a lot easier”. Most of the time I crash it’s a combination of things plane fight and AA gun or LMG. You got to know where all the AA’s are and keep them off of it, spot like crazy.
Some of the pilots in the 1 seater planes are really good at taking me down at long distances hitting me just enough so I couldn’t repair. Use the look behind to keep an eye on enemy planes. But with a good backseat gunner i’ll just fly the plane straight to give backseat best chance to take them out, don’t let the gun overheat. If you need to take out bombers fly directly below them, the gunners cant touch you, easy kills for the backseat gunner.
I know I’m forgetting stuff, maybe this will help out some new people to flying, watch it or don’t might be good toilet watch. It’s a lot of farming with a few plane fights
More plane fights in this one and shorter
I can compensate for velocity and all that pretty good, I’ll land most shots on them before getting forcibly removed from the gun or the plane gets out of range. If they survive the encounter they make sure you don’t survive the second. Decent pilots break those guns early on.
What my crew and I usually do is not worry about the planes, worry about the ground war but it sure would be a hell of a lot easier if we weren’t getting straffed trying to do our thing.
I’m not a decent enough dog fighter to shoot down enemy planes on a consistent basis when there is multiple of them. Problem on ps4 is there is too many dingleberries doing dingleberry things, like taking planes to kamakzi behemoths and tanks and etc. Hard to band enough people together to take down planes, planes are very effective with those damn bombs.
If you are not a pilot, then the Assaults Aa rocket gun is another great counter to planes. IIm not much of a pilot so anytime airplanes start dominating, I’ll often spawn in with an Aa rocket gun and start making pilots lives difficult.
I haven’t had that much not luck with the AA rocket myself and yesterday was the very first time I got killed by one but I was also being shoot and taking damage from a AA position when my plane was hit. If you fancy a go at flight by fire with fire here’s a link to a youtuber with some great tips on how to improve at dogfighting
If you’re don’t fancy using a plane I’ve found that the A7V heavy tank is great at shooting down low flying planes that are farming infantry. Had a game of monta grappa ops where I managed to get 5 planes. But my greatest opponent when I’m flying is the dreaded flag pole, it may look like I’ve got a couple of meters to easily get past it but then the game decides that the flag pole can reach up and clip one of my wings. So maybe carry around a flag pole somehow?