See, I have yet to be able to join a match. Everytime it either takes forever and I give up, or it starts and then ends immediately. That is the only game I have experienced that with so I'm not sure what is going on :(

Try searching for ranked matches instead of player matches. Most of the players use ranked matches because only ranked matches give points to rank up.

Who would have guessed - my GT is H Lecter :)

But beware, I'm not a gaming professional, I do it to have fun. If I'm on your team and we lose, you can be sure that I did my best but didn't succeed ;)

Here's a short story

I always play Tiger hunt, and just go dogfight the Fighters ignoring the ground targets.
Starting the mission not diving down, so i've been spotted by a wing of about 8 FW190's.

In the dogfight action flew over the first target site making a wing of another 4 190's join the fight.

Chasing a 190 and being chased by one i suddenly saw another coming in straight at me from 10 o clock.
Pointed my nose at him opening fire head on. I dodged the plane and it crashed right into the FW190 behind me.
So i looked behind me and saw pieces of both planes just falling down.

Makes me wonder, can you fire at planes and they explode? Or does it only happen with direct air crash?

It depends where you hit them!

yea but never seen them Explode into pieces like a direct crash.

I seem to recall doing this to a bomber, I just kept shooting even after it lost a wing and BOOM! That being said, I haven't noticed it happening since...

Same here, I shot a bomber after it was going down already and it blew up.