When the "Air Start" selection is enabled, and you are flying an escort mission, your flight will start in the air at the same altitude as the escorted aircraft instead of the normal 'perch' above some distance above them.

This occasionally causes collisions as soon as the mission starts and nearly always makes the aircraft swerve off in different directions to avoid each other.

Couldn't recall if I reported this before, but it's been around for awhile.

Thanks for the attention guys. Keep up the good work.

Yep, very familiar to me either . The only workaround is "Ground start".

Meh.

Ground start takes up too much extra play time with climbing & circling to mission altitude at the start. I love the 'Air Start' option - it gets us to the fun parts faster and saves precious playing time.

Thanks Nefaro we'll look at if possible. At least you can just avoid air start for escort missions, and use Autopilot and time advance.

Will be fixed in next release.

Wow - great to hear!

Thank you!

I'm also curious about how the "Air Start" option works regarding enemy flights nearby.

It seems like nearly every time I enter a mission using Air Start, there is an enemy flight high above our heads that often turns around to chase us down. Is this working as intended?

Yes it is working fine. Here it's random, maybe you have been more unlucky. But there will often be flights protecting a target or a nearby target as their own mission, so yes then you will start in the air, and yes right near them, the problem with "dropping in" on a moment in time...
For the best situations, fly full real unfortunately is the best way, take off etc.

I've found that if I avoid immediately going to "auto-pilot" and just let the game go for five seconds or so I can avoid collisions when I air-start. I go "hands free" for count of about five or six to let the planes sort themselves out and only then hit the auto-pilot function. If I hit auto as soon as the screen pops up and the sim begins, I often collide, especially with planes we're escorting.

Great news. I never had a collision using Air Start with British planes even though we started pretty close. The only time I had a collision is flying escort for Germany. Once the screen came on, BAM. I had it happen twice in a row so just used ground start, auto, time advance for that.

As usuall OBD is on top of it!