And, it's gotten worse... we are now blowing the **** out of humans. If it makes anybody feel any better, this is not being done technically *in* FlightGear... and if you follow my project all the way through you will find that it is being done with a virulently anti-war message, not a glorification in any way, shape or form.
That being said: Sorry for the terrible particle effects, my weekend ran out before I got Blender's particle systems under control - but soon we will have rocket trails and explosions, for now we have a placeholder. What we do have is rockets launching out of our helicopter, receiving collision callbacks from PhysX when they hit the ground (which is a bit of an ordeal in PhysX 3.x) and creating explosion effects among the hapless humans.