You are part of a team so usually it is up to someone else to kill heavy AA. Air and non-air factories fulfill different roles, which stem from their speed and interaction with terrain. Simply put:
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Land/sea players tend to contribute to a particular part of the map. Not all land/sea factories are suitable for all types terrain, but player take this into account by selecting factories that match the terrain in their area of the map. Players can often shift to adjacent areas fairly easily, but can leave fronts open. Large shifts are possible but costly in terms of time.
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Air players can contribute across the whole map with barely any travel cost. They are meant to target their forces to where they are most effective.
The result is that land factories needs to be able to deal with a wider range of problems, simply because a land player can't easily go support another area. Each land factory has some way to deal with raiders, some way to deal with defenses, some way to deal with heavy units. They vary in power across these categories, but do better than air against similar cost in AA. Air is the opposite. It can go anywhere, so if there is too much anti-air in one part of the map, then they can often support another.
If you have three Likhos but the entire map is covered by heavy AA, then the enemy probably spent more than 6k on AA (or you are playing Storm Siege). This is a positive contribution as an air player. You were so threatening that the enemy spent a lot of metal fending you off. Every front has fewer ground forces because of this, the support was successful. It gets even better:
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The AA is unlikely to be fully effective. Eg, if the enemy makes a push they are likely to push out of heavy AA range. Use the Likho then.
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The AA is vulnerable. Artemis (Screamer) can be killed, for cost, by a brand new missile silo and a single tacnuke. This is even taking into account the wreckage. The enemy is now invested in keeping their AA alive, otherwise the Likho reassert themselves.
To sum up, air is not a role meant for inflexible lone wolves. You are supporting fronts held by land players, not opening your own. Coordinate with the land players about what you can snipe to open up a front, or the AA they need to focus on to get your support. If the enemy makes a lot of AA and your land players are too busy or non-communicative, then adapt. Build a missile silo, plate a land factory, make a strider. The game would hardly be one of dynamic strategies if it were always optimal for a single player to make nothing but bombers, regardless of how much AA the other team makes.
The counter structures of air and land factories are entirely different. Each land factory has most of the "tactical level" counters, so they can each deal with other land factories. The main counter structure for air is "strategic level", with air beating ground, ground beating anti-air, and anti-air beating air. Removing this counter structure, by giving air explicit anti-anti-air units, makes ground units redundant in the counter structure. So then the question is, why even make ground? Air is so fast and convenient, and beats most ground forces, so shouldn't each team just make air? Sure, ground can be more effective as a counter, but air is really quite convenient. It ignores terrain and makes force easy to concentrate. If no combination of AA can beat a dedicated anti-AA air force, then it is hard to imagine ground having much of a role at all.
An alternate approach is to do away with AA and move air into the ground counter structure. So there would be things like a raider plane that is countered by riots and a riot plane that counters raiders. But such a design would make air unrecognisable, and in many ways pointless. Air would have to move and fight on land-unit speed and range scales for it to fully integrate with the land counter structure. But this seems like a terrible trade. Would you rather have two extra land factories, or a whole domain of combat that behaves differently, sitting on top of and supporting the land game? The latter is what we have now, and it seems pretty interesting. Air in ZK works quite well, which I measure by how many games have people being effective with aircraft for a lot of the game, without generally dominating the whole game. Perhaps we have players that enjoy the aesthetic of aircraft and the playstyle of land ZK, and want to do both at once?
