Depends what you want to do. I found the easiest to practise say targeting is to take control of the trainign missions. One of the main problems with those if though if you say fly the su-27 or f-16 in the trainign mission none of the other planes use chaff/flares so it makes it idiot proof to hit things. Then when you move onto the campaign its gonan get ugly.
Personally i liked the campaigns other then the fact that all stock campaigns where way to short (around 7 missions), just DO NOT play the Flaming cliff campaigns first i found all of them except the su-25t campaign very very unbalanced, Su-25t campaign rules though.
Dunno why would love to see someone beat all 30 missions in both the Su-27 and mig-29 campaign. Kinda doubt it was actually done or else i would of expected some sort of balancing to go into those.