Our Mayor's daughter brought an A-10 back to base when it had been shot to shreds and had no hydraulics.
Scores of pilots in Vietnam flew mortally wounded jets back to the coast before punching out.
Pilot don't like to be on the ground in a combat zone. It's dangerous and dirty down there!
Mechanical linkages, with balanced airframes that could actually glide unpowered. That all ended with the F-4.
The A-10 is actually a relic of that day and age, and comes with so many redundancies in the control surfaces that you can actually bring back a very wounded bird.
I am talking specifically about the training that pilots receive who are flying high-performance jets. There was a case over Iraq during the first Gulf War, where a Tomcat on a TARPS mission had one of its stabs blown off by a SAM. That plane came back, even landed on the boat. Two tails gone, that plane is NOT coming back.
I am talking about conditions where an ejection is imminent, and in such cases, there are simply no considerations about anything on the ground. None, dude.