A couple friends and I played this for 5 hours last night on a server and we had no issues.
This was a major improvement over the last air combat mission. We had a blast! It was also nice to have an objective that required us to pay attention and work together. We did have some issues with the opfor AA units until we realized where they were...guess that's really not a mission issue. Maybe you could mark their positions on the map as potential AA sites?
Finally, you've really refined the catapult launching! It was so awesome taking off on the deck and flying up into those clouds.