Anyone complaining about this has obviously never tried it.
It's disgustingly slow, can take 45minutes of flying to get to what could at best be a 5 minute fight. If you happen to end up trying to go to a base that has enemies near it, you'll be lucky to land, let alone rearm.
If you're flying and run into someone in the air, you need to ditch your landing gear, and run, which ruins all of the flight time up untill then.
So sure, you can fly a 163 hopping between several bases to reach the front line, where you can get a couple of kills, and be out of there 5 minutes later.
Without landing gear, taking off in a 163 wastes a TON of fuel, and will kill you trying as often as not.