Now that i've seen the movie a couple of times i noticed something that may be a plot hole or rather something that doesn't make sense.
When they go on the real mission they make a big deal out of having to hit the target 2 times, so far so good. All 4 planes are equipped with bombs though yet it's only 2 planes that actually dropped their bombs - Maverick and Rooster. Why?
Why didn't they plan for the other 2 planes to also drop their bombs to increase chances to hit? Maverick is the flight lead and releases his first, Phoenix is hot on his tail yet keeps her bombs and only jettisons them when they crest that mountain and the SAMs begin firing. Payback had technical problems but he could have also dropped blind like Rooster and pray for the best.
Still a great movie though but sometimes i like to nitpick
Good point. In the RW what they were doing is called 'buddy lasing', but with Super Hornets each plane could have carried a designator and bombs. Maverick himself did it when he 'demo'd' the mission after being grounded. It would have been more realistic to have gone in with 4 F-18F's, each with a backseater, and had redundancy on the target designation for each two-ship section. Like the original, there were a lot of technical inaccuracies in this movie, but a lot they got right as well.
But as I mentioned in a prior post, if the target is that vital to hit, you don't go in half-assed with a single division of planes. Since you are committing an overt act of war anyway, might as well go all-out and launch a full deck strike, and make sure the job gets done right. EW/Jamming, SEAD, TARCAP, the whole kitchen sink. That would have made the ending very convoluted, however, and taken away from all the character elements. This was a great 'hollywood' version.
