I'm pretty sure half my flight just comitted suicide

[Charon]

I just flew a single-player Pe-2 mission during the Battle of Moscow. We'd just dropped bombs and were heading home at 2k altitude, and were under attack by 109s. This wasn't going so bad at first. They were mostly occupied with our escorts. I'd damaged one with my forward guns, and they didn't seem to be doing too much to us.

 

I wasn't flying in formation, and I looked over just in time to see the rest of my flight all dive through the clouds. That seemed odd, since we were meant to fly home at 2k, but there were no more 109's in sight, so I set a heading towards home. I wasn't able to find them after this, but I eventually linked up with one other straggler. When I landed and reviewed the events, I found this:

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

One of our planes was shot down. I'm guessing our leader, Egor Osipenko. Then over the next 13 seconds, three more planes flew straight into the ground, despite suffering no major battle damage themselves. It looks like they tried to keep formation with a falling plane and didn't have time to pull out.

 

 

Edited February 11, 2020 by Charon
Clarity

[LukeFF]

You gotta attach the mission file when making reports like this.

[Charon]

I didn't know that was an option, thanks.

 

I wasn't recording, though. I don't know how useful the Mission file will be, since my flight seemed to dive in response to the leader being shot down.

 

mission.zip

[Knarley-Bob]

How does one record missions?

[Charon]

Okay, I managed to reproduce this and capture a recording.

 

This is a quick battle against a flight of 4x Il-2s. As the recording starts, I'd just shot up the leader. Moments later, he enters a spin from which he's unable to recover. Rather than flying on, the rest of his flight descend rapidly along with him. Two of them impact the ground immediately, the last plane levels off at extreme low altitude and eventually flies straight into a clump of trees.

bomber-suicide.zip

Edited May 25, 2020 by Charon
grammar

[unreasonable]

I have seen similar - obviously there is some AI logic problem sometimes when an AI flight leader is damaged so that it does not pass the order to continue the mission to the next AI plane in the formation.