[Robotic Pope]

Its certainly a lag issue. I'm thinking it might be a bit like when you play a laggy first person shooter where you try to move and it feels youre stuck in mud then suddenly you
fast forward or beam to where your blind input would have taken you.

BoP actually has a very good system of visualy hiding lag (we only see the lag with other players jumping and teleporting when it is considerable) hence the term mini-lag or micro-lag has been used for lag you can't see. You can still FEEL this lag though, your plane can feel slugish and then unexpectedly stall in a turn as the game trys to "fast forwards" your plane beyond its flight capability.
This also explains why you need to fire an unholy amount of bullets to take down planes with lag. If you could turn off the lag hider you would see your target jiggling all around which unfortunately acts as a very good evasive manuever.

Its only a theory though, I might be complety wrong.