Well a MiG-29 is hardly an unrecognized flyer.
sighReally, bro?
Why can't you move the MiG to Promotion II level and affiliate it with the Red Dawn? So even if the cults would have access to military airplanes before X-Com, X-Com could get access to the same gadgets once the contact with the Red Dawn arms dealer has been completed. And since the Arrow is already tied in with EXALT, a simliar thing could be done with the Arrow.
Because Promo III should be hard to get. It's part of the general design.
(Honestly, with MiGs at your disposal, you could just sweep most cult activities on the globe.)
Also, imagine that you are not allowed to use incendiary grenades, but MiGs are just fine. Not very sensible, eh? [EDIT: right, Juku said so too.]
So first of all, cults like the Black Lotus or the Church of Dagon don't strike me as the types of people who would bother learning to fly soviet era fighter jets.
*shrug*
Secondly, realistically the manors would require a runway for those planes to take off and land.
True, but they don't take off from this nice villa in the suburbs, come on. They simply take off from the same city.
Thirdly and most importantly: The only realistic way for the cults to obtain these planes would be through black market activities. I mean they can't just place an order with the official manufacturer. And if they had to purchase those crafts through the black market, than XCOM could do the same if they can't get them legally. Ohh and the cults would also violate the countries airspace and probably get shut down by the miliary.
They don't exactly own these assets, they're using corrupted national forces to get what they want.
As amokk_gw said, a UFO is something that's not indentifiable as something we know, including hostile fighter jets. The term came about as a reaction to certain WWII phenomena, and unidentified/enemy airplanes were quite plentiful then.
Wikipedia says that an unidentified flying object is anything that cannot be identified as any known design.
But anyway, this is a mostly American term; from a quick search, other countries don't seem to even use it (or any equivalent) in its official meaning.
Technically, what the game calls UFOs aren't actually UFOs, either. We know what they are, alien spaceships. We probably even have floor plans. 
That's true.
But UFO has been used as a synomym for a specific sort of alien spacecraft for so long, it's now a dictionary use case.
How? Genuine question. Little Birds are useless against cultist fighter jets, while manors and their air dominance have been brought up repeatedly as an issue for at least novice players.
I might appreciate the tight balancing and a more deadly air game. Not everyone else does.
Probably in many ways, as the mods was written with this limitation in mind. It's not like I have an analytics team who would pore over the mod to identify all possible outcomes and impact on gameplay.
You're supposed to be a weakling pushover at this level, and that's it.
I have already addressed the manors issue by simply decreasing their numbers, and the case remains open.
I think the idea is that they don't fly the jets themselves, they have inroads to the local (country-level, that is ) government and can paint X-Com flyers as hostile airspace violators who need shooting down. It's military personnel who actually fights you in the skies. Not sure this makes 100% sense, but certainly a lot sense than random cultists being allowed to freely and openly operate military aircraft by anything but the most dysfunctional of governments.
Yes, pretty much that. Not sure it's super sensible either, but close enough.
I feel like that's semantics. A MiG-29 just doesn't qualify as a UFO by common sense.
Fine, you can call it Marylin.
Excuse me, but what the heck am I supposed to do with this? Rename each instance of "UFO" in the mod to something else?
Solarius wants a certain amount of 'realism'. Others sometimes disagree how 'real' some of these things are, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that aspiration itself. Why make a mod that makes you roll your own eyes? 
This is quite on point.
Yeah. 
I also moved them to Promo II back when I had aspirations of redesigning the mod. That was way before any cultist fighters existed, though.
The only thing that MiG and Interceptor can do that bird can't is potentially bring down small or medium scout UFOs if they slow down. But you may as well just take landing UFOs for free.
Exactly, this is pretty much their function.
Raven is the first adult interceptor that can faceroll both cult MiGs and early UFOs. But chances are, that it's just UFO navigation research away from much better thunderstorm.
I honestly should make a super convoluted research tree with many aircraft parts and components from various sources to make each plane viable...
So i'd suggest buffing MiG's durability and lowering it's cost way down so it would be worthwhile to use in the first place.
I'm worried it would make the gap between the MiG and other interceptors even smaller.
I recognise your point, but I think it should be overhauled in a more complex way... somehow. I mean the entire air game. (Which I've already done at least twice...)
Although getting rid of 22+ manors wasn't walk in the park.
Sorry about that, should be less in 2.8.
I don't see how that's the players fault.
Umm... You allow the manor to grow to level 3 and claim it's not your fault?
I mean it happens all the time, to me as well, but I'd never say "it's not my fault"!
Until I read about manors here in the forums, I didn't even know they spawned the crafts. I thought they were protecting the mission.
Yes, it's a matter of experience. The game's name is "UFO: Enemy Unknown" after all.
IN THE END OF THE DAY: manor patrols are not the end of the world, you can play and still do most missions while simply staying away from those cities. Manors are supposed to be mostly an inconvenience, and I think they are. Of course, sometimes it will bite you hard, but that's what enemies are for.
