I fully agree that the timeframe in CM is to short for Air Recon in the WW2 parts.
Just for Informations, if you reed Zetterling or Edwards you will find, that Air Recon often dont need 24 Hours its more 2 - 6 in really urgent situations even less. In that kind of situations, they drop casules with handwritten notices and often the div. or bat. HQ-Recon units had relay them back to HQ for usage.
BUT the second factor is, even that works partly quite well, the kind of informations are much less reliable. Because the equipment and bad friend-foe-identification,....
Also what we do most time in CM is force-recon because the maps are often not that big and that was often the job for the recon-units like Panzerspaehabteilungen or more often than you might think the kradschueztenbataillon / kompanie (Motocycleinfantrybataillion/company) least are really underrepresented in many games.