The AI is hit or miss most of the time. Sometimes it's dead-on, sometimes it has a mind of its own, and a slight retarded one at that.
For every awesome dogfight, you have an AI wingman who will dump all of his external stores to strafe a ZPU. When I was developing terrains, I designed them around the AI. The ideal number of TargetAreas in a 1000X1000km terrain is 60, 30 for each side. I caught hell for this, but I think it works best. Each TargetArea needs to be very challenging, very well-defended. This gives the AI from both sides the chance to actually get to a target and do something worthwhile when they get there.
When modders figured out how to model friendly SAMs, terrain modders added so many of the damned things I thought their goal was to make a terrain that could, on any given mission, literally kill anything that flew.
Work around the problem, work with it. When you try to go up against it in this series, you will not get good results.