Nowadays, the aircraft in the game is too hard, and it is difficult for fighter planes or anti-aircraft guns to cause serious damage to the airframe, which is enough to cause runaway crash. Most of the kills are made by fighters attacking from behind directly killing pilots. It can’t reduce the life value of some aircraft components, at least it doesn’t always happen that bombers can fly away after dozens of 20mm gun attacks. 
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It is not BF, there is no health, there are components and damage to them, my guide might help you, I’ll link it below.
Stalingrad bombers are very hard to shoot down though, but that is mainly due to lack of ammo and tail gunners nuking you if you fly straight and level as it should be.
Some aircraft like the American P-47 and soviet IL-2 are known to be armored, and as such; are known to be very tough and resistant to damage.
Chances are you just aren’t doing enough damage to bring them down quickly.
There’s also issues with desynching, where you are seeing the vehicle in a slightly different position than the other player; so you’re not really hitting where it looks like you are.
Pretty much the only good belts to use is the 30mm and the 37mm
It’s nothing to do with aircraft HP and everything to do with hit detection. Damage, when it registers, is meaningful, the issue is getting the hits to land. Notice how aircraft never seem to lead enough when you watch dogfights from the ground? Aircraft are very heavily desynced and are much further ahead of the lead indicator than how they appear on your screen, at least that’s what the server thinks.
You can also see it when you’re being tailed, if you pull a hard turn and freelook to look back at the tailing enemy, you’ll notice the majority of their shots will be falling short until they get near point blank range.
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Il-2 had 4-6mm around engine, 4-6mm for fuel tanks, 6-7mm for cockpit and the usual 10-12mm behind pilot seat.
and from those the 10-12mm would be only armor part that could stop the 7.92 K bullet.
Even less the 20mm.
Shrapnells ? Probably wont do much. But bullets wouldnt really have hard time with its armor.
Even very thin armor would be effective against most bullets given the angle of impact, penetration values are often listed at optimal impact angles
The problem isn’t the health of the planes, at one point most planes were bullet sponges but that was pretty much fixed past a few exceptions. The problem is that hits don’t register well, when they do you see how easily you can tear a plane apart.
Don’t know for other types of ammunition planes use, for the 12.7 about 400-500+ away is that shots register the best. I’ve taken out complete sections of bombers with a couple shots only. Also have done it other times but only when being really close, along with both me and the enemy going in pretty much a straight line.
To me they seem really easy to shoot down, my Gunner often gets kills when I am in my 110 for example
Hardly, cas planes had more armor to protect pilot from ground fire, specifically the shrapnells from AA guns.
The 30mm and 37mm are buggy, I flew the p38 and noticed that I heard a pop from my plane, but no damage, then I turned around and killed the bf110.
American machine guns and cannons have significantly more damage than the German ones. 1 p38 cannon is more effective than 4 at fw190
that was likely him start up missing since they are low velocity. The bf110g-2 is the only aircraft I know that can take out an aircraft in this game that can tear off tail sections of the enemy
The 20mm cannon on the p38 opens the wings and tails. I’ve played it a few times.
The 30mm is a complete random. Sometimes the plane absorbs 20-30 shells without damage. I’m not satisfied with that.
Are you leading on the reticle or no?
From my experience on both sides of the p38 vs. Me110 fight, I find the p38 tends to disintegrate pretty quickly when it gets hit by those cannons.
At this point I’m easily convinced that the hit issues on planes and tanks has to do with netcode issues more than anything else.
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P-38 (along with the P-51C) from Normandy are actually quite weak. For the 38 any shot at it’s tail with a cannon has a good chance of tearing through it, that’s why it’s the easiest to shoot down with an AA compared to other planes.
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Still waiting on this to be done. I just emptied two entire ammo loads into a American fighter in Normandy from my FW, to no effect. Getting very tiring that these hit issues are still in game.