I more or less agree with Dozer. I don't mind gore that much but i don't consider it necessary either, so in that sense i'd like to see the development time spent on something that has a more universal appeal on the potential buyers of this sim.
What would be nice to have though is some kind of feedback to let you know when you kill those little pixelated people. Simply having a randomized effect from a list of possible outcomes would be good enough.
Sometimes when flying straight and getting bounced the virtual pilot would remain in the upright position and the controls relatively centered. So, after a while the plane would roll to the side due to the torque effects being uncorrected by the dead pilot, Also, the loss of thrust from the damage and drag from the torn metal of the airplane would give a small amount of altitude loss...as this goes on, we'd get the kind of thing we see in movies with a crippled plane slowly making its way toward the ground in spirals.
Some other times, upon the game registering the pilot as killed it could force a random control input. In these cases the controls would be violently moved to a random direction, with the enemy aircraft jerking violently before losing control.
In other cases, the pilot would simply slump over and slowly nose over towards the ground and so on, you get the idea.
This would be nice visually, especially for people who like making ingame videos, lend some extra variety to the way kills are depicted, provide some kind of feedback to let the attacking player know that he scored a pilot kill and can stop shooting (or, in the case of non-violent jerking of the stick by the "dead" pilot, not provide enough of a feedback...games that keep you guessing are games that don't bore you easily
) and it wouldn't even require the use of gore that would be detrimental to the game's marketing.
If gunner's could be randomly made to just silence their guns or jerk them violently to a random direction as mentioned before, that would round out the package for me. If we really wanted to nit pick, we could have the outcome of pilot kills dependant on plane attitude...a pilot killed during a dive will have more probability of slumping forward on the stick, pressing it down even more, than pulling it back.
Come to think of it, only FPS games show extensive gore and that's because they are usually taking place in an imaginary setting. Sure, there's blood in the ArmA series as well but not the amount of blood you see in games like left 4 dead or metro 2033. The reason is simple, some people get upset when seeing excessive blood effects in what they perceive as the transfer of a real-life scenario to their screens, but they are not affected the same when watching a thousand zombies get burned by a flamethrower, because zombies are not real. It's just human nature, most people have a built-in mechanism to show aversion to and empathize with harm done on whatever looks to us like a living person or animal, while we don't empathize with what can be clearly distinguished to be fake. That's why a game about killing monsters has no trouble selling copies even with over the top gore effects, but games with settings much closer to reality would face a problem if they used similar effects.
In any case, i think that some kind of death animation (that animation doesn't even have to involve the pilot, just the way he loses control of his aircraft) would be nice to have, not because i want to see blood and guts but because i want to know when the other aircraft is out of the fight.