Yeah, I never looked to see if it was perked until I'd lost like 20 of them. ROFL. Oh well. I had them to burn, because until last night I mostly used the T34/76, so I usually got lots of perks from my ground missions.
I'm really scared of the IL-2 now though. At one base I went to there must have been 6 people flying the IL-2 with the 37mm gun package. You'd get jacked from any direction, and some of them were smart enough to come in at a higher angle than I could elevate my gun. I got a lot of turrets popped by them, and a few outright one-pass deaths.
The T34/85 would shake things up, but it's really the new IL-2 gun package that radically changes the ground game. Who knows how it'll shake out?