Attached is a screen of how the scene was lit.
1. A dome used for final gather with an HDRI image of a sky pic.
2. Area lights top and bottom for each aircraft, bottom .1, top .3 intensity, white light.
3. Point light for the sun, 1.25 intensity with a hint of yellow using raytraced shadow but blurred on the edges. I think in hindsight depthmap shadows would have been more appropriate for the scene.
I rendered each aircraft with Occlusion, Specular, Shadow, Luminosity and Color on individual layers.
