I believe that this is somewhat the same theory they have on the new Euroreef recirculation skimmers. They let the water feed into the skimmer like you have yours, but instead of using the airstones they have a pump that pulls water in from the bottom of the reaction chamber and pumps back into the chamber. You can see the setup good in the first picture on this page.


http://www.euro-reef.com/products-csseriesrc.shtml