Ahh... The ultimate goal of any aircraft dio, depicting an aircraft in it's element... Almost a "Holy Grail", but stll doable with some imagination (and basic electrical work and minor soldering skills) and fair number of cuss words...
I've tried on a couple of occasions, with mixed results... The BEST one I did, (unfortunately, I don't have pictures) was in a shadow box using forced perspective. It was a 1/48th F4F in a head-on pass with a Zeke modeled in 1/72nd scale. The rods suspending the planes were inserted into the fuselage from the back of the box, out of the viewer's line of sight. I did a defused lighting effect with a couple of 6-inch incadescent tube lights for overall lighting, and a fill light to wipe out the shadows of the suspension rods, as well as lighting the gun muzzles of the Zeke with grain-of-wheat bulbs inserted into some spun-glass (Angel Hair) "flash"... I tried to wire in a flasher to the Zeke's guns, but it wouldn't "flash" near fast enough to look anything like the cyclic-rates of machine guns and looked ridiculous, more like "Eat at Joe's-Eat at Joe's ", so I left them "on" in a snapshot effect... however, I digress...
I used a frosted piece of plexiglass ceiling tile for the "sky" and used a wrap-around background of light blue tagboard with some whispy "clouds" sparayed on. It was pretty cool, I thought, but it could only be viewed by one person at a time. Without doing the "Half model on a mirror" type of diorama, you aren't going to be able to get away from suspension systems, so the shadow-box was the way to go for me... Actually, it's about the best way for any type diorama that you can think of that allows a realistic-looking setting for forced-perspective with a minimum of "footprint"..
The other was a massive WW1 dogfight in 1/72nd scale suspended from the ceiling. I had about 10 aircraft, a mixed bag of Allied and German fighters, suspended by clear fishing line from a paper-mache' "overcast" anchored to a light fixture, which supplied the light as well... This you could look at from all angles. It took up about 30-40 square feet of ceiling space, and had its detractors... First, it was impossible to keep the planes from moving in every little puff of air, and it was also a dust magnet, especially the suspension lines ,and next to impossible to clean...
Currently, I'm engaged in an "in fight, sort-of" diorama from The Blue Max, in which Von Klugermann's Dr1 has just struck the ruins with his undercart, causing his crash after he and Stachel were flat-hatting at the bridge... I'm using the "crumpling" undercart to suspend the model in-flight (pre-wreck?) by rebuilding the struts from brass tubing (plastic wouldn't bear the weight in scale thickness) and attaching them between the ruins and model. It needs some more work, but is quite rugged...
For your idea, I'd highly recommend the "shadow-box-mixed-scale-forced-perspective" route...