It's defintely not as hard to spot real airplanes. I spend hours looking for little cessnas and pipers every day without any trouble, and their usually painted white. These fighter aircraft were BIG (at least compared to most general aviation aircraft today. I think it's just hard to translate human vision capabilities into a video game. You have no peripherals on the game and due to the fact that everything seems animated it's harder to sight moving objects. As far as gameplay I just stay low and try to spot people on the horizon. During dogfights look for fires on the ground, I've noticed that most air battles happen over the same area and there will be a lot of crashes directly below the fight