Originally Posted by tomoose

I always put it down to a game-imposed issue in that the actual appearance of the aircraft (i.e. the 'object' being rendered in the 3D space) was 'broken'.
As stated by others, the crew "spots" an aircraft but you can't see it then suddenly it shows up. To me, the actual visual representation of the aircraft was being "switched on" at the wrong range by the game ergo the player would always 'see' it at the last minute so to speak.

I'm not sure if I explained that well but hope it makes sense. I don't think it's a matter of texture or skin of the aircraft blending into the background but rather the actual rendering itself. For example, in IL-2, you can spot an aircraft from quite a distance. It initially appears as a simple dot but as the distance shrinks the aircraft grows in pixels and beings to take the shape of an actual aircraft as more details are rendered. It's been my experience in SH-4 that the dot-to-pixels part has always been missing and what you get is the fully detailed plane showing up at a relatively short range.