You haven't dropped a supply crate at HQ in the past several years have you? It says so in the system message when the crates land.
Players want to combat, not ferry supply crates. That's why the whole concept is porked. A single troll on the opposing side can make ONE sortie to drop the HQ in order to spoil the gaming experience of the whole enemy country for hours - or force them to do extremely boring supply run for dozens of times which also will take a lot of time.
The game mechanic allows a single idiot to spoil the fun of many and that's not very good design.
Perhaps HTC was thinking that HQ would be a 'high value asset' that would be ferociously defended against attacks but the reality is that people are engaged in their own fun little fights while a single player spends an hour or more climbing to stratosphere or trying to sneak in NOE. The end result is that by the time someone notices HQ is under threat, someone must either spend perks to a Comet or start a very boring climb for an interception that will probably fail at those altitudes due to bombers unrealistic performance and gunnery power.
For example myself, who has played AH since beta, lack perk points to spend them on a Comet run. Once upon a time I lost THOUSANDS of perks because I didn't know that a simple act of changing your in-game callsign (using the same account) would permanently erase your perks. After that happened I never gained a significant amount of perks back, partly because I was playing on and off for years.