My favorite thing to do, and the thing I spent the most effort doing, is still flying jets. I played in the closed beta for 48 hours straight when they opened up Caspian Border on the last two days of the beta, doing nothing but flying jets, practicing.
I use an Xbox360 controller plugged into my PC to fly the jets, but I use mouse and keyboard for everything else. I abuse the third person camera to chase other pilots around, and switch to cockpit view when I need to aim. I rarely use the guided missile, because it's just too slow; if there's no threatening pilots around (something becoming more and more rare) I usually go with the unguided rockets for ground-strafing runs, because you can take out even an MBT with a single run if you're particularly accurate.
Jets are just so damn satisfying, and if you're good, you're untouchable.
