Since WB we've seen fighter-jocks (and the occasional bomber) complaining that a war of airfield vs airfield attrition is unrealistic. Fair dinkums. We have a city and stuff in AH, but relatively few people are aware of this or of the affects of bombing them.
I've posed this altnerative concept before and it's been met with quiet head-nods, and the odd spark of enthusiasm.
Continue allowing players the ability to disable an airfield, but surround each field with a number of villages or cities. By drawing lines between cities, you can draw up a front-line for each country's territory. Strategy is then achieved by capturing of cities. Airfield ownership is defined by which side of the front line it is.
A caveat to this; either airfields have to tend to their default country ownership, or a new strategy concept is introduced whereby if you capture an airfield, the enemy has to push the front line back past it before recovering it, rather than just re-capturing the last city to have fallen.
This could present some very interesting strategy activity?