Background Information

In battlefield 2 (and I presume other battlefields) the maps usually have open edges but if you go outside of the combat zone you get a warning and then 15 seconds later your health starts to drop and then you die.

It also had way more people wanting to fly aircraft than there were aircraft. Teams would be limited to a certain amount and you needed to wait for your current jet/chopper to get blown up before itd respawn and even then they took a while. People waited on spawn points in little groups not doing anything else, getting in to one tended to be a little victory all on it's own.

Helicopters had a pilot and a gunner. Pilot still has some missiles but the main feature of a helicopter was the "tv missile". It had a lot of range and when the gunner fired it his view became that of a camera on the front of the missile and you could direct it by clicking where you want to go. Hitting fast moving targets (and for many people even slow/stationary targets) was one of the harder aspects of the game but it was still a really good weapon because it would kill any vehicle in one hit.

Getting stuck with a shit gunner is absolutely balls if you're a pilot because you're mostly impotent. Getting the drop on another helicopter that hasn't seen you yet, it moving nice and slow, your gunner missing, the helicopter noticing you, and then you getting killed instead to be sent back to the long wait and low probability of getting another helicopter is a terrible feeling.

Being the gunner for a bad pilot was slightly better but still ultimately balls. If you noticed a threat way off on the edge of your vision you could at least still try to kill it before it killed you but generally were doomed to being flown off to some useless part of the map too low to the ground to see any targets.

What myself and most decent players wanted was the helicopter all to ourselves. You could fly like a non-retard, then swap seat by pressing (f12?) quickly fire a tv missile before your helicopter spun out of control, blow up the target, and then swap back and regain control before you crashed. It wasn't ideal but it was better than 99/100 partners you could get and your success/failure was almost entirely dependent on your own skill.

The asshole thing

What I would do if I got in the pilot seat and someone else got in my gunner seat before I could take off was, I'd spam the "get out" button, they obviously wouldn't, I'd type in "fair warning noob", then fly over to the edge of the map. A lot of the time aircraft spawn on aircraft carriers so this means I'd be way out in to the ocean where it would take many minutes of slowly swimming to get back to anything. I'd zoom right in on the minimap so I could see how close to the edge of the map I was with precision and what I'd do is be right on the line where my gunner was out of bounds but I was fine.

They'd get so fucking mad. Young teenage me thought it was the best. They'd be faced with a death (not normally to big of a deal in the game and better than swimming for minutes) but more importantly they'd respawn back on the aircraft carrier to rejoin the rest of the unwashed masses while I went off to do dope shit with my chopper.

The perfect storm of completely fucking over my own team mate being by far the best option for my own personal enjoyment of the game, the long wait for aircraft, that doing it or not was really effectively the difference between me probably topping the scoreboard at the end of the game or me and that guy getting blown up after a minute, the chat abuse that would follow for the rest of the (quite long) match. I don't think I've had that much fun in a video game since.