Just completed this mission and I must say that it was a most unenjoyable experience! The first time round, I did manage to stay with him but with a lot of cursing and swearing which made my poor dogs nervous. I ended up in vortex ring state while looking for him when the other pair dropped off their troops and crashed.
Second time round I completed the mission but just looked forward to getting it over and done with. :badmood: I've enjoyed the missions so far except this one, so here's hoping the next mission will be challenging but enjoyable.
Also if it would have been possible, the sarcastic copilot would have accidentally "fell" out of the aircraft on the ferry flight to the base! :evil:
EDIT: not sure if this is a campaign problem or related to Beta 1.5, but on a few occasions so far, my monitor has just faded to black during the mission. I fairly sure that it isn't a hardware problem on my end because it happens at exactly the same spot each time. When it happens, if you press pause then unpause it, the image is back on screen as per normal. My PC should have no problem because it's a mid range i7 gaming rig with 32 GB ram and a STRIX GTX 980 Ti video card.