Missiles have several modes of tracking, the most common are radar guided and heat seeking.

Radar Guided:
Radar guided missiles are often long range and very fast. Radar missiles see the world in electromagnetic emissions, they recognise known patterns such as the spin of an engine's turbine, the displacement between engines and things like that. Stealth aircraft like the F45-A based on the F35 are commonly mis-identified as built to be invisible, but this is incorrect, aircraft stealth is a combination of low profile hull design and internal mounting of systems to escape a radar's range of perception and to return as small a signature to the radar as possible. Aircraft like the F/A-26 have next to no stealth because they are covered in angles of all directions and objects that create a silhouette. Stealth forces a radar to only be able to identify you reliably when your much closer than normal, so dont think of stealth as the ability to sneak up on the enemy, think of it as obscuring your signature so much that the radar thinks your not a target.

Heat Seeking:
Heat seekers are usually mid-to-close range missiles like Aim-9's, these missiles track the hottest thing they can see, which in the vast empty sky is almost always your thrusters and engines. It can be very tempting when a missile is coming at you to hit the afterburner and try to pull high G's, dont. using your afterburner increases the heat of your engines by a considerable spike and makes countermeasures less effective.

Countermeasures:
You have two kinds of countermeasures, chaff and flares. Chaff creates a shimmering curtain of flashes and sparkles to radar tracking which makes radar guided missiles unsure of exactly which flash, sparkle or pattern you are. However you are still the most consistent pattern in the plume. Flares are high intensity burning countermeasures that create sheets of bright light and heat patterns that mask the hot parts of your aircraft form heat seeking missiles but flares burn out quickly, which means you are often still the largest signature of heat.

"Remember countermeasures make it easier to confuse a missile but basically do nothing to protect you on their own and must be combined with proper evasive patterns"

You've been locked and there's a missile coming at you.

Time to throw your instincts out the window!

When to pop countermeasures:
Its important not to spam your countermeasures just because a missile is coming, missiles need to travel and you can often see them on the F45's hud or as a newly appeared diamond in the F/A-26.
You can launch countermeasures once your confident the missile has travelled at least half its flight, any sooner and your just wasting countermeasures. You should also combine a few countermeasures with your turns.

How to throw off a missile's approach:
Missiles are not aiming at you, they are aiming at your "meatball", the little vector indicator that shows where your going in the air, because the missile needs to hit where your going to be when it reaches you, otherwise it will just fly past behind you. To this end, use your meatball to understand where a missile is going. Missiles have limited fuel and use it up fast, by the time a missile hits you, its usually been out of fuel for some time and glided the rest of the way towards you.

Now, to properly throw off a missile's approach, you need to force the missile to manoeuvre, this makes the missile use more fuel, faster. Use this to expend the missiles ability to make adjustments. Now flight is energy, your speed is energy, the missile's speed is energy. You can strain a missile all you like but its designed to counter that, to overpower it, you need to drain its energy. This can be done in several ways, the most common being to force it to climb towards you, hence the importance of attacking from above, a missile that is coming down towards you will expend very little energy tracking you.

Other ways you can drain a missiles energy are more contextual, for example if you are head to head with an approaching aircraft who's launched, you can turn 90 degrees to the right or left and climb, this forces the missile to pitch up and pull hard G's to keep up with you. Whilst the missile is doing this it will struggle to pull any other manoeuvres. You can use this to plan your next and hopefully final evasion.

The final evasion:
Your straining the missile hard, your popping countermeasures but its still coming. Now is the time for the most decisive action of your evasion, read the missile's behaviour, see where its coming from and quickly calculate to yourself where you can go that will tip the missile's straining over the edge, for example if you have turned right, are climbing and the missile is coming, at the last moment you could roll over and pitch down towards the ground. There are many ways to finally defeat a missile, its up to you to learn and teach yourself to feel what's right, so get plenty of practice.

Its easy to panic and resort to pure instinct but this will fail you almost every time. Here's a few mistakes that are made by people of all skill levels.

Running away:
A golden rule of fighting a missile is never run away from it, a missile will always catch up to you before you can get away.

Spamming CM until it misses:
You have limited countermeasures, make sure you use them strategically, its not wrong to fire lots of countermeasures "when you should" but don't waste them when you shouldn't.

Rely on near misses:
Most missiles never directly hit their targets in the air, they detonate as close as they can to you, if you rely on near misses you'll get shot down a lot.

Afterburner panic:
Its very tempting to go as fast as you can to evade missiles, don't, their "ALL" faster than you, using your afterburner makes your signature bigger, heats up your engines, drains fuel and lowers your agility.

Fly towards a turning enemy after a lock goes silent:
Enemies will usually try to avoid getting shot at and turn once they fire a missile at you, Missiles coming towards you only get detected at a certain range, always assume the enemy has fired first in a face-off.

Dive escape:
You'll see the AI diving away from missiles a lot, this tactic works sometimes but its not very dependable, like afterburner it lowers your agility and because of your speed, countermeasures will end up far behind you and ineffectual.

There are many more pitfalls and death traps that pilots both use and dread, experience will teach you everything, so open your mind and listen to what experience tells you and you'll be an ace in no time.

Here's a quick recap on the stages of fighting a missile.

STAGE - 1: Recognition
Study your instruments and try to deduce when a missile is likely to have been fired at you, you'll know a radar missile is coming almost immediatley but heat seekers can creep up on you out of the blue.

STAGE - 2: Straining the missile
Fly in a direction that forces the missile to both loose energy and fuel to keep on an intercept course towards you.

STAGE - 3: Countermeasures and the final evasion
Once you've got the missile where you want it, start popping those CM's like its going out of style and pull the manoeuvre that you've deduced will escape the missile's range of agility.

STAGE - 4: Punish the bugger for daring to fire a missile at your greatness in the first place.

If you do it right, an average battle with a missile should only take about 7-8 seconds for heat seekers and 15-30 seconds for radar guided missiles.

These are a set of scenarios for training in the aircraft without the pressure of mission objectives but also providing the threat of hostility from your targets. Consider these your level 2 tutorials. I've built one for each aircraft, enjoy.

AV-42C
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2169582750

F-45A
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2169583349

F/A-26B
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2169584078

Additionally, feel free to stop by Air Group Aegis. An upstart rookie friendly community for people to enjoy VTOL VR together and help learn more about the game.
https://steamproxy.net/groups/Airgroupaegis