I first bought this game shortly after it was released, stop playing due to the campaign not progressing past a date, then recently bought the re-release here. MUCH better - I've had a few problems but figured out the cause and simply didn't do "that" again". This is really trite and unimportant but I am intrigued; We were flying in formation with no enemy near, no flak - nothing - and my flight leader just fell to the ground. The debrief only said that he crashed. No wounded, no oil leak, no gas leak - no indications of a problem. Is there a logical explanation or was it just some sort of fluke (I wouldn't call it an actual bug). Maybe he just died of embarrassment as the flight racked up five bomber kills and he had zero :) .
Anyone else ever run into this?

You did have contact with the enemy though at some point, right? Then chances are he was wounded and bled to death.
When you are seeing bright red, you need to land or you will bleed to death in flight. It is rare since you are usually killed by then, but has happened to me.

Yes; quite a bit, however, wouldn't the debrief have stated "so and so was wounded"? My first thought was that too or an oil leak (haven't run into a gas/petrol leak yet but I assume it can happen).

Oil leaks end up in flamers. Petro leaks usually end up in a slow glide and attempted landing. I don't think I have ever seen mention of another pilot wounded in the debrief. Only my self and then a statement that so so-so has been wounded the list..

Come to mention it, I don't either. I think that info comes in the debrief in the list with "OK", "damaged", "destroyed", "wounded", "killed", etc but he was of course listed as "killed" and "destroyed" but that doesn't tell me if he was wounded first. Anyway, the AI acted appropriately (outside of him not landing rather hen continuing to patrol) - I was on autopilot at the time and my plane and the other two slowly circled down as he fell then got back to business.
Hey one more question: I've noticed that during a dogfight, an enemy plane that appears to be under power and trying to make it back behind their own lines no longer responds to "T" and "D" but does to "E". Does that mean the plane is basically shot down - going to crash? I've followed them and they fly for a long time to the point that I fire on them again. The AI planes stop shooting at it at that point and go after others. The afflicted plane doesn't fire back. Boelke says follow them down in case they are tricking you but, in game, am I wasting my time?

Actually most will land. They will go straight and keep rolling until they stop or hit some sort of obstruction, which there really is not much of. That is one of the nice things about Full Canvas Jacket is there were debris scattered across No Man's Land.
And if they land no one gets credit, even if it is on your side of the lines. Of course if you learn to Hex Edit, that can always be fixed :)

I've been lacking patience and shooting them until they crash so I guess I should continue doing that. That does explain why on occasion they just disappear without a crash sound though and why at times I thought I had kills but didn't get credit. My pilots will be short-lived now anyway - Jasta has been replacing crashed Alb D-Va's with Phalz D-III (I think the Alb D-III is even superior to that one).

There is a bug when you run out of airplanes, where it says there is no missions assigned, do you want to create one. It will freeze up right after that. :(
I few things you can do is one, don't be so aggressive, and two, run from battle when it is tight, land, and end mission even though your boys are still fighting. It will save their lives and planes.
Really wish the AI would have a survival instinct built in instead of the fight to the death mentality. It would save us alot on planes and men.

That bug sounds like what happened to me once in the very beginning of a game (1 Sep 16) but it was for lack of pilots. I had to select the lone wolf mission (none others worked due to "not enough aircraft available" then abort it. That caused nine new pilots to transfer into my squadron (including a commander - I was apparently in command of a one-pilot Jasta 10 as an UoF) and all was well. Selecting any other mission froze the game. I also have noticed that if one has a blank active pilot page along with a pilot, the game crashes. The fix is to delete both pilots and create one new one.

Of course you could always learn to hex edit the campaign files. Once when all my Jasta in RotJ received was Fokker EIVs, I went in and upgraded them to Alb DIIs Wasn't easy, but I was tired of trying to fly against enemy N17s and SPADs in Eindeckers :)
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to Sygrod's site on Hex Editing RB3D:
[url=http://web.archive.org/web/*//home.golden.net/~ksharman/rb/Main.html]http://web.archive.org/web/*//home.golden.net/~ksharman/rb/Main.html[/url]

I'm opening the link as I type this but, something caught my attention: E-IV? So the RotJ patch (?) has additional planes? I don't havre good resources to research a lot of the data but, I really thought that by Sep 1916, the E-IIIs had largely been replaced and certainly by 1917, it was E-IVs/Vs. Some other planes seemed to arrive prior to the date in the plane's summary, too. The very beginning seems to be the worse. I've read by several sources that the original jastas in the summer of 1916 used the Halb D-II because it was the best plane available then and shortly thereafter, the Alb D-II were fielded replacing them. Seems by games start, the E's would have been relegated to second-line jastas, not the elite ones (or home defense).

RotJ can push the date back to August 1915 and allow you to pilot two-seaters.
The mod is not perfect and some of the early warplanes are in the field to long like the Fokker Eiiis & EIVs, and the Pfalz EIV, or do not exist like the Nieuport 11.
But the aeroplanes are non-mirrored and it is the mod I started with.