You can find 98% of GVs by flying a storch at or just below tree level if they are in the 4sq miles of your base. The visual angle is what cloaks most GV's shutdown or sitting. Most players won't and for a good reason. GVers will shoot storch's because once they are found, tanks or a bomb will follow. I get tired of doing it, means I will be pilot wounded or main gunned almost every time. Not to mention the PO'd GVer often comes back with the obligatory wirble which I find waits for me to fly up really close. Then getting anyone to kill it can be pulling teeth. Even green guys want to hide and sneak and not be seen. After all, it's only the red guys who are hiding and sneaking and ruining the game.
The easiest terrain feature to find GV's with a storch is the European village complex from the Europ tileset. Just get low, tree top or lower and follow the convenient grid of roads and feilds. Still it's easier in real life to see something as large as a tank if someone hasn't dug out a hide for it and cleaned up its tread tracks that say follow me, follow me. In real life we don't have that strange morphing together of objects just outside of gun range for wirbles and main guns the graphics engine does as you get farther away. Or separated and clarified as you go close enough to be suddenly skeet shot from the air. Combine that with the cloaking the trees do at steeper angles and the combat area is full of invisible tanks.
Anyone ever noticed that sitting in a wirble under some trees that there seems to be an invisible bubble around all the leaves inside of which an airplane flying over, it's Icon disappears as you look up through the canopy? Wonder if this is working in reverse as part of the cloaking the GVs get for their Icon not displaying? Part of the time when I get low in a storch and close up, I can make out the GV, but, if there are some leaves and branches involved, the Icon never appears. Then I can loose orientation of the GV and end up placing myself back in too close for a main gun or MG skeet session. The storch is not what it used to be when it was first introduced in AH2 when it comes to seeing hiding GVs at it's max visual range. For the amount of effort to kill tanks with planes, pretty much they are nearly Icon less in AH3.