Could the plane afford to take a bit more damage? seems to get very damaged very quickly. even after both guns on an island are taken out the plane seems to deteriorate for no reason at all.
You must be aware that once the plane gets hit it will keep loosing oil. Only repairing on carrier can prevent this. We can increase the oil level on easy difficulty , however this is the feature of the original game.
Indeed, it was a feature of the original, but I believe it was a lot more forgiving, if you got hit far from the carrier on the remake you have no hope of making it back to the carrier.