The trick to fighting with planes against other planes is very simple.
Planes do damage when they are retreating… you have a Clock which tells you the moment of bombardment or attack aka a battle tick, 3 seconds prior to the battle tick reaching Zero you issue new MISSION to planes returning planes to the airfield or you can retarget the planes to the same exact point of patrol. As planes meet in red area is time to give your planes new order so that they will retreat.
With each map this 3 seconds might vary because of the delay/lag of the given map, small maps will have almost no lag while big 100 and 500 maps will have lag as long as 30 seconds to a minute, number of units, share maps, fog of war and other display options like resource and names of provinces all affect the delay/lag time
Sharing this with the community is for the purpose to give all players an even playing field , there are no shortcuts you will need to experiment and test how to best use this gift on how to fight with planes.
Good Luck and Have Fun Generals