Planes landing on aircraft carrier

You were right in that you can land the planes anywhere there is a legal landing space. Fighters and Tac Bombers are not tied to the carriers that they departed from. In this game the flat tops are just floating airstrips for lack of a better explanation. You can even land them on a ally’s carrier if there is room for them.

Yes, I term this move “shuttle bombing”.    the planes on the carriers fly off, landing elsewhere.  The planes that can barely reach “crash” land with 1 space left usually, which lets you do double duty and makes your carriers extremely powerful.

The rules say (paraphrase) that your fighters are independent of the carriers, so one visual thing that can help is at the beginning of your combat phase, place the fighters in rows off the ships.  This is a reminder that until the end of the turn, they don’t have to rendezvous and are completely independent until then.

This can lead to some crazy flexibility, because of the rule that you must BE ABLE to bring a carrier landing space for the planes in order for them to attack, but that has insane permutations.

For example, Japan may be trying to attack SZ 80 with one fighter currently in SZ 38, in order to kill a transport.  There is no where for the fighter to land with just 1 move left, unless a carrier can cross SZ 39 into SZ 79, and lets say that SZ39 is full of UK fleet.

In order to attack the transport, you must also attack SZ 39.  Even if 1 sub comes against 30 UK ships, there is some <1% chance of winning, but a chance exists.  It seems illogical, but you can either attack both squares, or neither.

Of course, against 30 ships, your sub cannot practically win, so the plane would then crash after it does it’s duty, since the carrier cannot reach that square unless SZ 39 was clear.

Know this goes beyond your question, but the flexibility that your opponent is using can be used in several game-winning ways.    Those carriers (undamaged) can do all sorts of things (go in as casualties, act as a ferry, rescue planes out of gas, shuttle bomb, send planes off and then move back home, getting new planes etc etc etc), and can do different things depending on how your combats go.  If you use them correctly, you will be able to attack targets farther and more flexibly than with any other unit combination.

Lose planes with the least movement first
Lose 2 carrier hits then 2 plane hits and (repeat) when you are down to just carriers and BBs…so all that lives can land. 
damaged carriers are nearly useless unless they are fairly certain to survive the whole combat and they are already at a base…

That happened in the actual war at one point, intentionally rather than because the CV was sunk I mean. USS Enterprise had a broken (front?) elevator and couldn’t land planes rapidly enough so they landed on Henderson Field in the Solomons campaign.