Free to download and "own" "forever" Epic style, or free to experience until the end of the week?
The Tomcat is an absolute beast, though, so be prepared to be reading an instruction manual just to play a game if you want to go all out.
Also, to anyone who goes on DCS multiplayer for the first time: IFF IFF IFF.
Beware though, this addiction leads to things like buying entire hotas setups from companies like Virpil and VKB and that's a very pricey proposition.
In short, increasingly well modelled but ultimately only an abstraction due to some fairly obvious reasons. The JF-17 apparently has the best IFF model in the game but I only started flying it yesterday.