Many times in MMO's players become discouraged at continuing to play when they find themselves on the losing end of a war. The mechanic I suggest is to hopefully help encourage new players who don't have much PVP experience in this type of game, to continue playing despite being constantly beaten by more experienced players.
I call the mechanic 'Toughness' and I've literally ripped it off a game called Kenshi. Toughness is the stat you need to level in order to withstand attacks, reduce bleeding and decrease the time you're knocked out.
In DU, this could be translated into a mental attribute. The more damage, knocks and losses you suffered from in combat, the sharper your character becomes in the cockpit. This temporarily allows for a slight speed increase, a more intuitive sense of when to react, slight fuel efficiency increase, slightly better chance of hitting the target, stronger resistance to in-flight symptoms such as dizziness, motion sickness due to high speed flying, rotating, etc.
Of course we could just go the easy response and say 'git gud' but that doesn't help to solve the fundamental problem of players leaving because they keep losing.
The idea behind this thread is not to hope the devs take this mechanic into consideration, because this suggestion can be easily exploited, but more to begin a discussion on how to help encourage new players to start or continue playing despite being surrounded by people 'of higher levels'. Then everybody wins. The core player base sees a more lively world, the devs get more money and new players don't feel so daunted at the hopelessness when there are mechanics that give them some degree of advantages in a fight.