Fred as I understand you, you'll be using the SH4 ME for your mission building....yet needing to use the only good tutorial for SHIII's ME for reference. That will work just fine, I do too.
One thing you might want to do is to download a mission someone has built and see what they did. That
AoB Test Mission is a simple .mis file having a stationary submerged Porpoise sub with several Japanese ships approaching at different headings. You can have JSGME load it into your game, finding it in the Single Missions menu of the game. It's short, but to the point. There are no plane fly overs, but that's not what I made it for.
You
do have to be a bit careful with your units (although, I think
this may be just what
YOU want). I remember making a similar mission with Jap ships approaching. Behind them a couple of miles, I had a U.S. carrier and a couple of escorts approaching next. As I watched the Jap's go by, a couple of U.S. planes swooped in and sunk one of the ships! They had spawned from the carrier on their own and did exactly what they should have done......detected and attacked the enemy! That's not what I wanted to do, but it's what I
should have expected.
One thing you may want to do is add a mod that allows you to have a better "Free Camera" than what the stock game offers. Not that I'm pushing my mod to you (most mega mods do the same thing), but using
Optical Targeting Correction for the stock game will give you a much better view of the outside world. You can get as close as you would like to the units involved, even positioning the camera on a ship, to get a "first person" perspective of the action. Using the "pause" key you can stop the action, yet still move the camera around to a position you like for a picture. I've even paused the game, moved the camera into the path of an incoming shell, then restarted the action listening to the shell as it wizzes past. Neat stuff!