Out of 3 runs (1 win) air combat did anything only once so maybe make it easier to have an effect; if i understand right you need to have bomber planes and have more fighter planes than the opp fighter+AA which seems pretty hard. Somehow while i had the fleet menu open and was clicking around i managed to click and travel to the nodes on the map that i couldn't even see; might be related to not being able to click on destroyed sections of a ship (i didn't understand that at first)