My recon planes are always shot down!

[Griefbringer]

Originally Posted by PantherCub

IMHO it would be more realistic with air attacks taking place before the battle than during it.

On advance and assault battles you can do this as preliminary bombardment if you want to - and if you use level bombers they will not be available for a second run later on. (They probably will not hit anything useful, either.)

As for historical air actions close to the front lines, there was a practice of mounting air recognition panels close to the front lines, to indicate that this was still friendly area but that enemy front line would be somewhere ahead. Of course this did not always work quite the way it was supposed to - especially when some rear area folks wanted to be safe and mounted extra panels way farther from the front line than they should have been used.

Personally, I am not very fond of using air strikes myself. They don't offer the kind of tactical challenge that manoeuvring units on ground involves, they can take quite a lot of time to resolve (especially if there are lots of AAMGs around) and when I use them they rarely cause significant damage (cannot say the same for AI air strikes on my units, though).