I’m planning on making a map based campaign for AI (I don’t even have a regular opponent yet and I have brought mighty empires to use as a map base!) and thought I could ask you excellent Gentlemen for advice and ideas.

The plan I have so far is that you use the mighty empire board to represent the battle zone and across it are scattered airfields from which you launch your planes and factory complexes you use to build new planes.  Land armies wont take much (any) part in the game since air wars move a lot quicker than the armies on the ground.

The map will be split in half, and the objective is to destroy the enemies ability to fight, either by destroying their production facilities so they can’t replace their planes, or their airfields to stop their planes from flying.

Each turn you can launch flights of aircraft from your airfields and move existing flights.  Each player takes it in turns moving a flight.

The distance they can move will either be 3 spaces for fighters and 2 for bombers (or mixed wings) or be based upon the aircrafts speed values in game.

Each flight can move for ten turns before its fuel runs out and it crashes.

When two flights meet, or a flight moves over a target, a game of AI is played.  Ammo spent in the game is lost until the flight returns to base to refuel.

Pilot skills
All pilots start the game with the following skills:
Emergency manoeuvres
Ejecting
Yo-yoing
Sustained burst

During the course of the campaign pilots gain experience for various things (turning up, winning, shooting things the usual stuff).  When they level up they gain either new skills or their plane gets special refits (which are lost when they get shot down but eject).

These advances are (so far)
Pilot skills
Advance tailing
Extreme manoeuvres
Short controlled bursts – the plane has 50% more ammo for gun type weapons
Executioner – If the pilot downs a plane with just one hit remaining then it doesn’t count as using any ammo, not useable with sustained burst, ace and double ace only
My bird – When ejecting on a roll of a 6 the pilot doesn’t eject but coaxes the plane back to base, no plane upgrades are lost.

Plane upgrades
Improved Augurs -  missile ranges are increased to 08â€Â

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Tyranid air marshal

For this i would highly reccomend a copy of Tacita Aeronautica if you haven't got one already.  It's got all the stuff you need and more.  
Not read the post in great detaiul but i'd suggest that some of the upgrades you've suggested are a tad over-powered; especially the increase in ranges!

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I've got Tactica.

The upgrades are surpose to be a tad on the overpowered side since they are ace skills, however they are of limit use.

The range increase is for missiles only, which most planes only carry two.

The short controlled bursts (or extra ammo for da ork pilots), could be overpowered, a thunderbolt goes from 4 to 6 quad auto cannon shots and 3 to 5 las cannon shots

Executioner can only be used on enemies with one hit remaining, or Hell blades, but hell blade spam is cheese.

Improved vector engines is just the Tau advanced stabalisation system

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Tyranid air marshal

I'm unfamiliar with AI but I have played and run plenty of campaigns... I've got to say that map campaign's are hard to work to completion. I prefer a more linear progression, like a video game where there is a set number of missions with a knock on effect from each one. You even get to throw in a few unknowns along the way if you feel it's required.

Anyway, best of luck and hope if you manage to get it off the ground you'll post it up.

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The lack of completion is why I am setting objectives for the campaign.

Destroy the enemies manufactoruims
or
destroy the enemies air fields

I might throw in an events phase in which one or both players get secondary objectivesthey have o complete within a certain number of turns (bomb an enemy city, insert a special obs unit) and a turn limit.  If they complete the bonus object then they get extra resources.

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Tyranid air marshal