@panther Yes, the spirit of the rule is to avoid Kamikazee aircraft. Which you create if you're to allow this kind of move that me and Cernel talked about where a bunch of planes obviously will become Kamikazees because the person does not bring the carriers into battle but waits for an obvious inevitable defeat of that single unit sent into a doom-stack to enable any amount of fighters to cross territory they otherwise woudn't be able to!

In that sense the rulebook trips itself. Or rather the spirit of one rule is violated by the literal implementation of an other.

Regardless, we are on board on what the rules are in a literal sense. The question is why they haven't been changed all these years when they can lead to absurd situations that we see experienced map mapmakers in at least TripleA have taken into account when "clarifying" the rules for their maps.

If you and others have had these discussions so many times, how haven't you and in the end the developers of the board game come to the same conclussion? That it's absurd.