so lemme tell u about IRL dogfighting and how it relates to Star Wars! At the beginning of WW2 in the Pacific theater, everyone was forced to use carrier aircraft, and the Japanese fighter was the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. It was everything you’d want from a fighter: small, more maneuverable than any other plane of its day, and packing enough guns to destroy any airplane in its crosshairs. Its main rival was the American F4F Grumman, which had many features which on paper looked like advantages on paper, but didn’t actually help it in being a… good fighter. Things like (relatively) heavy armor and a high top speed seemed like a good idea on paper, but they also made it sluggish compared to the Japanese fighter.

But until the Americans found a crashed (but still completely intact) Zero to do practical tests and analyses with, the navy pilots were stuck with the slow F4F, similar to how the rebels in Secret Cargo are forced to use the Y-wings. But the Navy pilots came up with a brilliant strategy to combat the zeroes that took advantage of both their heavily armored planes and their numbers. They invented a maneuver called the Thach Weave! 

It’s really simple, and Ezra and the other pilot pulled it off perfectly. When the enemy plane follows one of you, you become the bait, and start moving in such a way as to give your partner the perfect shot! The easiest way is for both pilots to weave until the non-bait gets the kill.