Career Campaign AI planes despawning

[cawcaw]

I've had an issue with a plane despawning in the process of gunning it down.

 

My AI teammates RTB'd after completing the objective, but I decided to chase down a lone 109 instead. After a good turn and burn I managed to latch onto his tail and I proceeded to empty my MGs on him. Didn't have much on me at that point, but once my MGs were out of ammo the plane literally vanished into thin air right in front of my eyes.

 

Anyone seen this before?

It seems the despawn was triggered by my MGs being out of ammo, but I still had cannon rounds I was hoping to finish him off with. 

[TG-55Panthercules]

Am away from my BoX PC so can't check it, but it sounds depressingly similar to a problem we've had for years in RoF - apparently in RoF (for some reason I never saw explained) they tied the enemy aircraft despawning event to distance from the player's flight leader's plane, instead of the player's plane, so you would get situations where enemies would despawn right in front of you because you had left your flight leader (or he had left you) and were chasing something that got too far away from your flight leader.  Sounds like maybe they replicated the same weird choice in the BoX career mode.

Edited September 9, 2018 by TG-55Panthercules

[unreasonable]

I have seen this a couple of times in BoX as well when flying not as the leader: so I agree with @TG-55Panthercules, it is the same mechanic as RoF: nothing to do with the ammunition.

The only thing that can be done about it is to stay reasonably close to your leader: not sure what the trigger distance is, but if you stay within visual distance of your leader this will not happen.