What is the point of giving it a range of 130 when the game only fires aircraft weapons from 4 or 5 hexes away?

You must have noticed that while running your tests. Give it 255 is you want it won't make the least bit of difference.
Changing the AP value to 7 won't work because that # of guns code for class 11 weapons is broken ( has been right back to SP2 ) but has been fixed for the next patch and, as I said, that "trick" won't work for Helo weapons.
Don