I don't think we'll have our own pilot visible, but we'll see others in the aircraft.
For example, if i'm flying a Blenheim i won't be able to see my legs but i'll be able to see the bomb aimer up front in the nose of the aircraft (there is a recent screenshot of this exact thing).
I suppose this will work in a similar fashion for other aircraft too. So, if i'm flying a He111 i'll probably be able to see the bomb aimer, but if i switch to the bomb aimer's position i won't be able to see him. However, i guess that if i am at the bomb aimer's seat and turn the camera around i'll be able to now see the pilot.
If it's confusing you think of it like this: crewmen are visible as long as you are not occupying their seat.
It's safe to assume that it's not because our PCs can't handle it, if they couldn't we wouldn't be getting any visible crewmen at all in the internal views. I think it has to do with the fact that there will be the option to click on the cockpit switches, so having a 3d model of ourselves occupying the seats would obscure too much.
Just think of a pilot with his right hand on the stick and the left on the throttle, a visible 3d model of this would obscure the lower half of the instrument panel (where the compass is on the british fighters) and half the left pedestal where usually things like flaps, landing gear and trim controls are.
Sure, i'm not going to click on the flaps or the gear (i'll use the mouse for the secondary controls to reduce the amount of keybindings i'll need to remember, the primary stuff will still be on stick and keyboard), but it's good to be able to look around and see at what position it's set because we've been already told that there are no HUD messages anymore (at least on higher difficulty settings, don't know about the rest). Same for the engine instruments, especially now with the improved engine model, and some of them are also low on the instrument panel (temperature gauges in the 109s for example).
I think that if there was a pilot figure in the seat i currently occupy i'd also need a key to toggle him on/off (much like it's done in Black Shark i think), so that i can see what's behind the guy's arms when i need to.
Most probably i wouldn just toggle him off and leave it there (i prefer ease of use in the interface so that i can fly with higher difficulty settings over realistic visuals at the expense of controlling my aircraft), but i'm all for options so i wouldn't mind as long as i can turn it off.
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