Bomber Crew

• Conserve fuel as much as possible - Raise the landing gear as soon as you lift off to reduce drag, start using the engineer's "Lean" ability as soon as you raise the landing gear, and any time you're not in combat. In most missions, the first time "Lean" wears off, you should be crossing the English Channel, which is also an excellent time to move the engineer to his turret and also right around when you'll usually get your first radar contacts)

• Remember to buckle the pilot's seat belt, you should never move him from the pilot's seat!

• In fact, during normal conditions, try to only move the bombardier (between the nose turret and bomb sight), and the engineer (between the engineer's seat and the dorsal turret (B17)/add-on ventral turret (Lancaster).

• During combat, (while your engineer is manning a turret) the best person to put out an engine fire with the engi's extinguisher button (if you can't or don't want to emergency dive) is the navigator - his seat is right there, and he isn't doing anything super-urgent (sure, navigating, but if you're dealing with a horrible emergency with multiple injures or something, you can usually just let the plane fly along in a straight line while you try to salvage the situation.)

• Train at least one of the rear gunners' secondary ability as medic, train the others as engineers - you will generally want to address wounded crew/mechanical problems/fires in the rear half of your aircraft with one of your Gunner/engineers who is already stationed in that area, as your primary engineer is usually manning a turret with higher DPS and a better field of vision than the side gunners anyway, and since it will take the engineer forever to move the entire length of the plane (because of all the armor he's wearing, see next tip)

• Armor up! Put as much gear on your crewmen as possible to increase their armor rating, even the measly 1-point from the toughened O2 bottle. Low temperature survivability is a secondary concern. The more armor they're wearing, the more likely your tailgunner will survive that unexpected face-full of Messerschmitt bullets.

• Train your engineer and bombardier's secondary abilities as Gunner, they'll be doing that almost more often than their primary job.

• Change altitude with the high/med/low buttons when enemy aircraft are approaching to reduce the accuracy of their incoming fire

• The engineer is the best person to move between the upper turret and the engineer's seat

• All the abilities recharge, you're not wasting anything if you have your gunners pop off some incendiary, etc. The mustangs the radio officer can call take a minute or two to arrive- a good time to radio them is before you reach your primary objective.

• Ammo feeder-equipped guns are better than superior non-feeder-equipped guns. Get everyone ammo feeders ASAP so you don't have to constantly ask them to reload.

• I gave all my crew members cheeky names that helped me remember what position in the aircraft they occupy (Paul Pilotson, Roger Rightside, etc), I like to imagine this was marginally helpful at least.

• If you don't like the 3 missions being offered in the mission tent, I think you can save, exit to main screen, and reload, and it should have a different ones (although I think there's only 4 or 5 total for every "tier" of progress though the missions)

• I'm pretty sure you can grind the same missions for extra cash, as long as you don't take the next plot-advancing one (usually the high risk critical mission), you can keep doing the lower-risk ones.

• Use hotkeys. Numbers select crew members, R tells gunners to reload, and you can hold shift to go to internal view temporarily. Other keys that you will use less often are F to tell someone to go to bed, and P to promote them to emergency pilot.

• High altitude is your breather. Fighters can't follow you. You can't stay up there forever, but you can take a second to breathe, and tell your top and bottom gunners to reload (tail could probably reload as well, but nose won't have enough time until you get better O2 bottles, or if you had already carried an ammo pack up there)

• Mark your enemies right away. It's a pain to do so once they get into range and start weaving around you, better when they are clustered on approach.

• I'm not sure if this is controversial, but you might as well game wipe if the plane goes down, so saving money and space on survival gear and parachutes is fine.

• Make sure you have at least a couple medkits and fire extinguishers on board, preferably at least one on the fore and aft sides of the plane.

• Pilot is the only one that absolutely must stay in his seat. Navigator and radio are important but can be sent for repair jobs. Mechanic can run all around the place, as can the gunners of course.

• The auto ammo feed guns are typically one damage level below the manual feed guns. As a result it can be helpful to put an auto in the fore and aft and manuals on the top and bottom, since the ammo supply is right outside of them and don't require walking.

• Speccing your gunners into first aid or mechanics is a good idea for their second class choice.

• Once your mechanic unlocks "Lean" fuel consumption then fuel falls way down the upgrade priority list.

• The game will absolutely let you use the emergency dive at an altitude that will put you in the ground, don't trust it blindly.

• Run recon photos if you can, you can't grind missions and the photos are worth a lot of money.

• You can land your plane with no landing gear so that it explodes on the runway and it will still count.