I play the starfighter PVP minigame in the Star Wars MMO. This seems about typical for scoreboard results at the end of any match that actually involves good pilots. It’s not because the bad pilots are avoiding trying to shoot the other guys down, it’s because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing (and don’t seem capable of learning).

“As shown in the last chapter, the dominant fact of air combat is that roughly 80% of all fighter victims in war are shot down unaware of their attacker — and this appears to be at least as true of combat with radar-equipped Mach 2 fighters as with 90 knot biplanes. Stated another way, 80% of fighters shot down had no opportunity to use their maneuvering performance, their fire control or their weapons, no matter how superb these may have been technically.”

“Of all 800 F-86 pilots who flew more than 25 counter-air missions in Korea, about 4.8% accounted for 48.2% of the kills, a number typical of most air-to-air wars.”

On the AK question, I always found it odd that the Pentagon decided to equip the Iraqi National Army and Afghan National Army with AKs.

That’s part of the reason we spent as much money as we did to develop precision guided weapons, so that aircraft could do the ground-attack role from comfortably out of the range of radar-guided guns and MANPADS.

Note that the above only applies against someone who actually has those things, but that such air defenses are now possessed by even some third-world countries.

The AK’s advantages are that it’s cheap and easy to manufacture with Soviet-style industry, and it’s low maintenance. (With good maintenance, an AR is quite reliable.)