found 2 reasons so far why aircraft carriers and not spawning aircraft if they have airgroups assigned to them:
1) game was doing incorrect comparison of current game date to airgroup's exit date (it was checking if airgroups exit date > current game date and if so skip over code for possibly creating aircraft - they meant <)

2) carrier's airgroups were being treated exactly like land based airgroups

again! This means the Default Air Strike Probability was being applied to them. That is going to change to 100% probability if it's a carrier (thus they get the chance to launch some number of aircraft). Also the nighttime modifier was being applied to them (carriers). I'm going to remove that if they are carriers (I may change that to a small value 0.1-0.25 so that if it's nighttime there's the small chance they will not launch aircraft).
That's all I've found so far...the function for this is HUGE! I'm sure there will be more to come because it's quite obvious there was no QC on the code at all