With a lot of people asking for a no icon environment (me included) we are going to have serious problems related to different planes paint schemes. For example, as most of you surelly know, finding out where is pointing an enemy c205 at 300 yards in front of you is a very hard task (I can only see a mess of sharpy low definition textures) while you can see where is pointing a P51D at even 1000 yards. Planes like P51D, P38 or even F4U will be in serious problems, they'll be detected much earlier than the rest of the planes. F4U paint scheme is absolutelly inadecuate for a non sea environment.
IMHO, all the planes are very well defined at very short distances and terribly defined for medium and long distances, it seems to be a problem related to their textures. For example, taking a picture of EAW (1024 16bpp) with a SpitIX 1cm sized on screen, you can see it perfectly defined, now try it here and take the shoot once the Spit is just 1cm on the screen (wing to wing 6 o'clock), you'll see a big diference. This problem is acentuated by a so pixelated terrain, with current terrain textures, most of the time I see only a mass of "moving" pixels for medium distance terrain. This effect of "moving" green pixels deteriorates even more the shape of planes at medium and long distances.
In conclusion, with actual visuals, having a non icon arena will make knowing where the enemy is pointing its nose much harder than in RL.
