HAWX first comeback for air combat genre - your favorites?

Air combat games are like pork pies - no-one will admit to enjoying them, but somehow they sell. Now Ubisoft has officially revealed that it's entering the fray with Tom Clancy's HAWX, a gritty flight shooter set in 2012 and due out on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC this autumn. The game promises to provide 'the next evolution of high altitude warfare' introducing a Ghost Recon-style squad management system, allowing you to call in and direct other planes. There's also a four-player online co-op mode and 16-player dogfights.

All well and good, but does anyone care enough about the flight shooter to celebrate its re-invention? And what is there to re-invent? What are the legacy titles? There was After Burner, of course, and the mystifyingly successful Air Combat series. Wing Arms on Saturn was sort of okay, as was Konami's Dreamcast flyer, Airforce Delta. And there are lots of very worthy and realistic PC flight combat sims with instruction manuals like phone books, but these are mostly unintelligible to all but a specialist, contained community. More recently Warhawk on PS3 has done enough to interest gamers, though of course, it's possible to play online, without ever getting in a plane. No, as a pure genre, this is something people tend to dip in and out of without becoming passionate disciples.

So what have been your favourite air combat games? And what must Ubisoft Bucharest do to create the first genuinely interesting mainstream example for many years?