And while the aircraft are fairly closely limited to their actual RL capabilities, the GVs are not.
There's two separate topics. Vehicle capabilities and environment.
For aircraft you're making a point for "real" capabilities. Which is basically limited to their performance. No more, no less. They are trivial to use with basically 0 workload for the pilot, spotting aircraft at a range where icons appear requires extreme patience and a bit of luck, in-flight high-precision radar, ...
That's no more real than the modeling of the GVs. Probably, GVs are more real, since a single player simulate the complete multi-person crew of a tank plus infantry accompanying the tank, where in an aircraft the player simulates only the pilot.
For example, where aircraft have to fly across a sector of water to attack a base on a different landmass as they did in RL, the GVs simply (Hey! Presto!) spawn from one base across a sector of water into an attack position on a different landmass. No boarding an LST and disembarking on a contested beachead as in RL.
Thus, this is why I say the game has been skewed to favor GVs in some (many?) respects.
This is a property of the environment, not the capabilities of the vehicles. In here a single GV is moving, while in reality it would be multiple vehicles moving together plus people on foot. The main difference is that a real vehicle once spottet couldn't get far away. Here GV can simpy teleport to another area (despawn, and reappear at any spawn of their choosing).
On the other hand, aircraft don't need maintenance either. The fight isn't between aircraft in combat with the supply chain for GVs but with GVs at the front lines.
The aircraft in AH have access to the exact same info the WW2 pilots had, plus some. There were no gv icons, you couldn't "hear" the gv running, the towns didn't flash. Now I'll grant you, as far as I know, tanks didn't "Main Gun" aircraft down either. There are no "vehicle convoys" in AH, so that argument is irrelevant.
Plus "some"? Plus a lot. Also, plus a lot of stupidity. In reality, tanks didn't main gun aircraft, because pilots were sane enough to not come in so low to drop bombs/rockets from such short range that it would have been even remotely viable to get a hit with the main gun. Diving in vertical at 400 mph to drop at 1000 ft to get pin-point accuracy on vehicles? Not the typical approach in reality, but the main reason why the Wirbel is so deadly in here.
want to kill a town - take a bomber, not a Calliope
need to capture a base - take a goon, not and M3
other GV's trying to capture your base - take an Il-2, not a tank
Tired of your tank getting killed by Il-2's - take a fighter, not a Wirb
As it stands, none of those aircraft options are the better option and game suffers because of it.
Except for the troops I don't see your problem. A bomber clears a town in max. 2 passes, even a rocket-loaded M4 can barely do it with one load and takes much longer. Fighter-bombers can attack GVs much more reliably than other GVs can. This includes being nearly untouchable for the GVs (depending on the sanity of the pilot - not on the uber powers of the GVs). Reliably taking down IL2s with Wirbs? Only by continuously respawning, waiting for the pilot to mess up, unlike doing so in a fighter, where the fighter can be basically untouchable by the IL2.
Lack of patience, and really really wanting to push through is the problem. Going what may feel like the easy way and pushing through forcefully creates a vulnerability, that you seem to perceive as an imbalance.
However, going the slow and safe way increases the risk of becoming a victim to enemy fighters. They have more time to set up an attack. Even friendly fighters as support won't help much, because also the enemy fighters like to push through to get the easy kills, instead of going the safe way. This behavior is supported by in-flight radar and aircraft icons. In reality it was much easier for ground attack aircraft to avoid being spottet, or to get away at least. The enemy wouldn't be stupid enough to follow to the deck even if able to maintain visual contact, and continuing pursuit through ack.
The point is, flying over a GV at 50' would be easier to spot than this.
Maybe and no. Physically, maybe, due to higher resolution of reality (consider getting a 4k screen to solve the problem). However, doing 300+ mph at 50' you'd be quite busy watching for other things and flying the airplane. GVs are nicely visible at that distance in game. Dieing has no consequences, and workload for flying is minimal. Quite an advantage over reality providing more time slices to visually scan the area for GVs.
Do we have dust trails in AH? You do in RL. Ever flown over a pickup truck moving across a harvested wheat field at 5k+ ? I have in a PT-19. VERY easy to spot. Even a parked green John Deere tractor parked on a green wheat field is VERY easy to spot.
Try again in typical European weather. Europe isn't the typical American desert.
I'm not trying to argue that everything is fine with the ground war. The level-of-detail feature of the trees makes things behave very inconsistently. At different detail levels (distance/zoom setting) vehicles may or may not be visible. This was a lot better with the old trees, that were always exactly the same, regardless of distance and zoom. Once in drawing range - clear visibility. Maybe its less of an issue when moving the tree-slider to max-distance (can't do that at the moment).