I run away anytime it is advantageous to do so. The use of speed to gain or re-gain the initiative or negate an enemy's advantage is the luxury afforded by having the faster plane and/or the most E. It is no different than a more manueverable aircraft using that advantage to turn inside a less manueverable aircraft. The use of a speed or an E advantage to engage and disengage at will and gain seperation is a fundamental core principle of air combat. It is the reason planes over time from WWI to the present have gotten increasingly faster not increasingly tighter turning. Although this may seem counter-intuitive, the runner, not the chaser always retains the initiative, think about it. The runner is the one that has the power to determine if, when, where and to some degree how a fight will occur. If you have ever been led to ack or higher enemy by a runner who then turns to re-engage you know exactly what I mean. To put it another way, the runner is the dog and the chaser is the tail he wags...
The popular mythology of feeling compelled to engage any plane with any other plane and fight until you die irrespective of performace, relative energy and positional advantages/disadvantages, ignoring available options to do otherwise, is a complete fictional contrivance of gaming and quite rediculous. The vast majority of air combat tactics and dogma, which we endeavor to emulate to a degree, is entirely predicated upon utilizing the advantages or your aircraft to negate those of the opposing aircraft in an effort to destroy it or prevent it from destroying you. To choose not to do so is not really pure air combat at all but some kind of trivialized arcade experience more akin to Ms. Pac Man, Frogger and Asteroids. If everyone adhered to that arcadish perversion of air combat we'd all be best off exclusively flying planes such as zekes and hurri's, the tightest turning plane would win virtually everytime, all other factor's being equal. If the Americans in the Pacific had done so we'd be speaking Japanese in Texas and hailing the Emperor.
The price you pay for flying a faster plane is proportionally poorer turning ability, conversely the price you pay for flying a turnier plane is lower speed. This simple trade-off is the over-arching balancing factor of this game and of the real world of air combat up to the modern era of guided munitions.
For every person I know who is a wonderful turnfighter I know another person who has perfected the art of attaining, maintaining and exploiting the initiative of a faster plane with deadly efficiency. Neither is better or worse than the other, they are simply two facets and approaches to air combat. Both require skill, knowledge and finesse. In reality we all do a little of both every flight, some better than others and to varying degrees of the spectrum.
