There's a spectrum of award / penalty that can be used. Today, I get marginal satisfaction of seeing someone bail if I chase them down. It's good enough to know that I'm either preventing them from reaching a target or preventing them from receiving all the perk pts they would have received if they did get home. Would I prefer a kill? Sure! But I wouldn't be that upset if they did it. However, giving me a kill doesn't change anything for the bailer. It's the wrong incentive.
We need to think about this some more. I think that if we see growing numbers of players again, then we will see more video arcade style of play as these new players will not be steeped in our culture. It would probably be a good idea to think about how we incent people to behave appropriately. The current perk point bias towards landing missions is a start, but we're going to need to evaluate the arcade style point optimization that will be done. For example, when HQ goes down today, I see people resupplying by flying C-47s over, making a drop, then bailing and doing it again. This is because the benefit of rapid resupply outweighs the cost of bailing.
To get around that issue, there would need to be some cost of not returning your plane. Today, we do that with the perk system. To take advantage of that, we would need to ensure that bombing a target (or resupply) and bailing reduces the perk points more than the bonus received (after the deduction for not returning to base) from the mission in the first place. Then if every plane had at least one perk point of cost (except one plane/vehicle of each class which would have 0 perk point cost), then we would have an incentive for people to try to return from their missions.
Unfortunately, that kind of a perk system makes it tough on new people who don't have the skills to last long and earn perks. They would be stuck with a single fighter / attack / bomber / vehicle until they started living long enough to earn perk points. However, this is probably not much different than how War Thunder works with the skill tree. The difference here is that a skill tree is an always positively increasing capability while the perk system has ups and downs depending on how well you are flying at the moment.
If one of each class is too restrictive, then make it once of each country of each class. In the end it becomes a tuning of perk costs / rewards that finds a happy balance (e.g. perk formations but not singles?).
I don't know that this will solve the bailing issue as there would essentially be no penalty if flying a no perk plane, but it might help reduce the frequency and help teach the culture of AH as well.
It would also have an impact on other things as well. Think about base attack / defense. Would you continue to up fighters for field defense of a capped base if you knew that every one that you upped was likely to cost you perk points? It might with the right balance, or it might just teach our culture that it's a better idea to not do that. Would we see an increase in BnZ over furball as furballing would be a higher risk tactic than BnZ and your chance of losing a perk'd furballing aircraft would therefore be higher.
The above can be somewhat mitigated by making the 0 perk planes good furballers. Then noone worries about taking them out and losing them and in the end, it's a personal choice for risk / reward.
There are probably holes in this, but the idea is simple. Use the existing perk system as a means to guide people to fly in an expected manner.
