During campaign play I suddenly found my approval rating in Asia drop at the end of day (00:00), which made me conclude I'd missed some terror mission or something in Asia, where I have no radar installations. So I load up my save from a day earlier and send my 2 interceptors and my dropship to scour the entire Asian continent for a ground-based mission. However, no matter how much I sweep the area, my ships never find anything.
In the meantime, I've created a small mod that makes it cheaper to build new bases and radar installations and causes them to build instantly, to let me experiment with base placement more easily and figure out the base locations that give me optimal coverage. So, by this point I'm wondering whether I'm just to dumb to search the right areas or whether the mission is somewhere else in the world and the approval rating for Asia is just collateral damage, so I load up my mod and drop a radar base on Asia.
And voila, it instantly discovers a ground mission at the extreme southern edge of the asian mainland. So I load up my regular, unmodded game again and send my planes over there. But for some reason, no matter how many hours they spend hovering or flying over that spot, they never find the mission. For some reason, only a ground-based radar installation (base or tower) is able to find the mission.
Is this intentional? I thought sending planes to sweep areas outside your radar range was to be a valid gameplay tactic. But if the aircraft can't discover missions on the ground, that puts a bit of a damper on that idea.