I've flow a few missions in the career mode and have found it pretty engaging.

Confused about how it works

It appears you can have multiple career's progressing at the same time and they are tied to the planes you select ( currently have one going with the SPAD and one with a Folker DV)

If you die does career end? I know I had a crash that I survived and the career kept going.

Are the missions randomly generated and go on indefinitely or until the end of the war.

Not a lot of documentation, it is a learn by doing thing, but thought others may be able to clarify.

Yes, each career is related to one specific aircraft. The more aircraft you own, the more simultaneous careers you can have active.

A career ends one of three ways:
a) You die.
b) You are captured (i.e. forced down behind enemy lines).
c) Some unknown condition is met that triggers career completed. This can be after any number of successful missions. I've had a career completed after about 5 missions.

In order to start a new career in a 'used' aircraft, you have to delete the previous one. Unfortunately, all awards earned in that career will also be deleted.

Which makes the Career mode a bit of a downer.

I dunno, I pretty much fly career missions exclusively, and have been having great fun with them.

Lately I've been tweaking them a bit, adding a windsock and giving those poor observation planes some scout coverage (and making enemy patrols larger), but the basic designs are very good. I do put some custom skins on my squadron and the occasional ne'er do well on the other side.

One of the things that is very astonishing about the mission generator is waypoint location. The are invariably placed at a recognizable spot on the map - bridge, where forest meets river, town, etc. - and not in obviously random locations (like the middle of a large forest).

+1 on the "Mods On/Custom Skins" issue. I don't care about leaderboard stats, but it would be nice to get a medal now and then; perhaps they should just kill the Single Player leader boards and not worry about what a person does outside of the multiplayer environment.

2nd that.

me too

Besides, IMHO it's not really worthy of bragging rights unless one is flying against another person.

If I write in our squadron forums that I was shot down by the AI, big whoop. Write that I got shot down by WW_Sandman and there's heads nodding in understanding.

Not that he's shot me down yet; we haven't seemed to link up in multiplayer. But it's just a function of time, as old habits are hard to break.