Preferred method for creating flying vehicles?

Looking to make a plane/space ship in my game and I noticed a lot of tutorials and free models use a vehicle seat and a script that adjusts the velocites of said vehicle within a while loop.

Obviously doing this for dozens of vehicles in a game can certainly be un-optimal especially if you are going to be implementing other mechanics in your games that may be resource heavy.

So what is the best method of doing this? Should I set network ownership to the player sitting in the plane, and render the physics on the client? The planes are solely used for transportation and nothing else.