A friend of mine has been using an interesting defence against air assault where rather than ensuring nothing is intermingled and can be drawn in together, his most vulnerable units are actually surrounded (in base contact) with larger units.
The idea is to ensure that the opponent doesn't have the option of deciding whether to call an intermingled combat or not, but is simply in both unit's control zones and has to fight both after disembarking.

The risk is of course that if it goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong - as it did in his last game where he lost his defending unit and BTS to the first air assault

He was using a chaos army, but the same would hold true for any army with small expensive units and large formations, for example Guard Regimental Command completely enveloping Manticores to protect them vs Thunderhawks (with the added advantage of potentially having multiple commissars).

What are people's experiences with this approach, what other forms of anti air assault do you find most successful, and what types of anti-air deployment do you favour?
I'm taking a Guard army to a tournament featuring 6 Thunderhawks and 5 Landas this weekend so have a great opportunity to experiment with all sorts of approaches.

I had one player attempt a less severe version of this tactic against my necrons a few years back.
It came unstuck by the simple fact that I chose to engage the formation behind the screen from my maximum firefight range (thus ignoring the screening units ZoC, and remembering you can shoot through anything that isnt a war engine) and IIRC wiped them out before supporting fire from the scarier formation came into play.

Also, being blocked in by your own protecting formation limits the ability to countercharge, which makes clipping assaults easier and more effective.

so against a CC heavy Air Assault (orks in landas, assault marines, terminators) it's a reasonable gamble, but against any FF heavy Air Assault, its a pretty bad risk

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Since I only have a few scouts in my armies, I usually rely on AA Units+Overwatch to stop those assaults or at least cripple the assaulting formation for a later counter attack.

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As lord-bruno says. In my Minervan list I always field 6 Hydras and 4 Thunderbolts. Reason for this: Our meta is air-heavy. Our Ork players often field 9 FBs and 2 Landas, Marines with T-Hawks, Eldar with Raiders and so on. In my AMTL CML is always a priority.

On the subject of air assualt (kind of) am I doing this right.

Start of turn - Thawk lands and a devastator squad disembarks. Squad plus thawk shoot. End of turn.

Next turn - squad gets back in thawk and moves to different position on the battle field. Then disembarks and all shoot again?
We were doing this in a game the other night and it seemed mental

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Nope.

three immediate reasons:
1, when you hop into a war engine, the war engine can no longer activate that turn
2, you cannot take off and land in the same activation
3, taking off takes place in the disengage moves

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Ah apologise, I should have clarified

1) unit was already in the thawk
2) we did land, but did not take off in the same turn

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Again, no.
you cannot "take off" with a thunderhawk unless you are performing a disengagement move. This takes place in the end phase, and has no way to then "land" elsewhere on the battlefield. Landing only takes place during a ground attack action.

You can do the following
turn 1, thunderhawk flies in, devastators disembark, shoot some dudes, at the end of the turn the thunderhawk flies off and leaves devastators there
turn 2, devastators move, shoot, whatever. Thunderhawk flies in, picks up devastators, at end of turn, thunderhawk flies off with devastators inside.
turn 3, repeat turn 1

if you do the following:
"Thunderhawk lands, troops assault, troops consolidate back into thunderhawk" then the thunderhawk cannot disengage afterwards

you can also do the following if you have a spare thunderhawk, due to a (frankly quite stupid) rules loophole.
Turn 1, thunderhawk 1 moves in with devastators, who disembark, shoot some stuff. thunderhawk 2 flies in, picks up devastators. end of turn, thunderhawk 1 and 2 both disengage, thunderhawk 2 now has devastators onboard.
Turn 2. same as turn 1, except thunderhawk2 starts off.

(though, strictly speaking, the rules for the war engine transports provide no provision for thunderhawks to "pick up" infantry in the traditional manner, war engines only have rules to allow the infantry formation to board the thunderhawk as part of the infantry formations movement, but that is apparently ignored by every person ever. It would solve the loophole where sometimes units can get out of an aircraft, shoot some stuff, get back into an aircraft, and fly off, all in one turn, and other instances they cannot, because all "get onto an aircraft" actions would immediately negate the ability of the aircraft to fly off that turn, but that will never happen, because thunderhawks are sacrosanct)

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JTG the rules for aircraft picking up units as part of their own activation are in the aircraft section, not the war engine section:

"Alternatively, the aircraft may pick up any friendly units within 5cms, assuming they will fit on board of course. After embarking or disembarking any units, the aircraft may carry out its ground attack."

So no ignoring of rules needed

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Or, to give a simpler answer to Berkut666's post without all the extra opinion:
From the FAQ.

*edit Thanks for pointing out the rules Kyrt!

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Perfect thanks guys. I have 2 THawks that can act on tandem anyway

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