I'm kind of sad they didn't use anything from Raptor: Call of the Shadows. It had a pretty damned hardcore low health and death animation. Low health, and your jet started smoking and burning, and when you died, it went into a cutscene of your pilot trying to save the plane as it's coming apart around him, and then shows your pilot in the still burning wreckage. It was pretty hardcore. Still beats a lot of the death animations I've seen in a lot of more modern games.
Plus, it was a badass game all the way around. Great music.