Cannot Kill Aircraft

Let's just go through a list of what problems currently face AA.

Stingers:

• I have tested on portal and stingers can literally miss hovering helis. It's not super common, but it's not uncommon either. 
• Any map with a single building makes singers a joke since they now try to predict the aircraft's path rather than moving straight towards them. You have better odds of using an RPG on a jet than hitting a stinger unless its Mirak or Firestorm. 
• Stingers, despite being heat-seeking, require lock-on and RADAR to function in this game. This means you can disrupt them by flying low (extremely easy to do in this title) or using flares. All the weaknesses and none of the strengths they should have.
• Jets can make strafing runs with 100% safety by just flying at speed and only popping flares after the first attack because the lock-on range of stingers is so limited. Seriously. The range is about 700m, they need ~2 seconds to lock on, flares provide ~4 seconds of immunity to new lock-ons, and then they need to acquire lock-on again for about ~2 seconds. You can literally fly directly over them with impunity as long as you're fine with strafing runs (i.e. fine with doing what the vehicle is literally designed for). Jets can even turn around and by the time they're back in range their flares will have resupplied and their vehicle will have been repaired. Literally no risk to them.
• Stingers ignore target painting, meaning flares work on them 100% of the time.
• Stingers don't even have splash damage to punish last-second flares, so even flares deployed in the last .000001 seconds still results in 0 damage to the target.

Turrets:

• AA turrets basically can't touch jets (or even fast-flying helis) because of the low projectile velocity, inaccuracy during sustained fire, and slow turret rotation speed.
• AA turrets allow explosion damage to bleed-through to the operator, meaning even indirect fire results in a death and air units don't need to be accurate when attacking them. 
• AA turrets have repulsively low health, meaning they can be destroyed by virtually any attack from either ground or air units.
• AA turrets are fixed implacements, meaning they are often sought out and killed before they can even be manned by players if a competent pilot is on the server.

Vehicle:

• AA vehicles have only 2 missiles in a salvo (despite the model showing 4 missiles at the ready). This means they cannot use a missile to bait flares, as it requires 2 to kill and one does effectively nothing but slightly inconvenience the pilots (doesn't even disable flight control like the stingers). This means an AA vehicle effectively cannot deal with air targets alone, as the air targets get ~10 seconds extra time while the vehicle reloads another salvo to secure a kill.
• AA vehicle missiles have a shorter range than engineer stingers. Pilots can literally fly higher than they can be targeted. See above why that range is insufficient. 
• AA vehicle missiles have a max range after firing of ~1000m, after which they will despawn, resulting in a "miss". This means even if they somehow get a lock-on and manage to fire a salvo, the missiles can literally despawn before they hit a fast target like a jet. 
• AA vehicle missiles also try to predict where the target is going to be rather than just pursuing them, meaning they often fly wide and fail to hit helis who have any kind of momentum or jets that know how to cut engines and bank. 

What part about this do pilots have to complain about? "Wah, I can't farm 100+ kills because a Hail Mary RPG hit me!" "Wah, stingers can lock-on to me and make my life slightly inconvenient for .5 seconds before I kill them!" Grow up. This isn't about punishing good players (most pilots aren't good, and even they can ignore AA fairly easily). This is about making it so a critical part of the sandbox has a place in the game. Let's just discuss heli balance, since jets are an entirely more complicated beast. 

A good pilot should lose to a mediocre bordering on below-average AA vehicle the same way a good IFV driver should lose to a mediocre tank driver or a good engineer should lose to that IFV. It's supposed to be a hard counter to that entire opposing part of the sandbox. It's a good thing if hard counters are dominating the thing they're supposed to counter. It should take an exceptional pilot to avoid AA and a god-like pilot to take them out. If a heli is being harassed by an AA vehicle, it should have to flee then rely on ground forces to take it out. Other vehicles have to do this all the time, and helis should be no different. 

A good pilot should have a fair chance against an AA turret if it was left alone and the turret got the drop on the pilot. This is a light counter. You have ways to mitigate it, and ways to avoid it. Turrets are a known quantity and should only be effective at punishing mistakes the pilots make or harassing them to the point they leave its effective range. 

A good pilot should be challenged by a lightly coordinated team of engineers with stingers. It should be a stop-the-world style event where the pilot has to react quickly and take them out before they can get their shots off, or flee and come back when the engineers are no longer vigilant.

A good pilot should dominate an uncoordinated attack by disparate engineers that can't coordinate their attacks (coordination includes accidental coordination or single-squad, not every attack should have to have the entire team on discord to take out some nuisance pilot). That's a huge part of their meta. Pilots should be unparalleled when it comes to this style of combat.

I have been both a successful pilot and AA user in previous battlefield titles. Piloting is not as difficult as you pilots make it out to be. It takes experience, but the skill is not so difficult to demonstrate that it deserves reverence. It is not so much more difficult than being a good tank driver, or counter-sniper, or engineer, or even an AA user.  Pilots all like to think they're gods among men, but they're not. They deserve the same mortality that literally every other part of the game has to experience. No one complains when a tank wins against light armor, or when an IFV loses to a few barely-coordinated RPGs, so why should pilots get a free pass to dominate every map they're on? Air units are a part of the sandbox. They shouldn't be effectively separate from it.

I think the best solutions would be a buff to range on all AA lock-ons, a removal of the RADAR floor for stingers on urban maps (possibly all maps), adding small amounts of splash damage to stingers to punish pilots who are too close or react late, and a cap on the number of flares for vehicles (if you want to camp in an air vehicle, you should have to spend time rearming if you want safety). To balance that, I think that air vehicles should be a bit more lethal against armor and each other. Really make their hits hurt.