Both

I don't see any mirrors at the He 177.

ctrl-m few press

A little tricky but it's possible ! ;)
https://i.postimg.cc/ZRd4YnRx/grab0010.jpg

U-2VS Crashes
 

Not a new problem, but the U-2VS still crashes often when flown by the AI in multi-aircraft flights, on the Moscow 1 map at least (see the TB-3 single mission for example). The lead aircraft in each flight is fine, but after a while the others fall out of formation and crash. It looks like the pilots just fall asleep.

After seeing that this situation is still the same in 4.14 I have done more testing myself in various missions. I did a lot of experimenting with speed, skill, formation, time of day, season etc. Changing the map to Moscow 2 (no snow/skis) seems to fix things in the TB-3 mission, but in others even that doesn’t help. Sometimes reducing the bomb load seems to help too.

So I guess the U-2VS is generally limited to single-aircraft flights when flying with skis and certain loads, on the Moscow 1 map at least.

Does anyone know why it is that the lead aircraft are always fine while the followers crash even when they are all set to the same skill level?

Yes it need fix. Did you change it as a level bomber to see the behavior?

I've built lots of U2 missions and make all of them with the player as the wingman, seems to help with the crashes.most stable speed is 100kph at 800m, fuel 70%. Also don't link gatk icon to target,as U2 seems to be coded as level bomber.

R-5 handles better now but still takes forever to climb out, for fmb purposes it's better to air start 200m higher than rest of waypoints.

This plane indeed had a big problem with its lift when it was introduced in the game. In fact it could only climb up to 5200m instead of 6200m, and that was after flying for two hours with a full tank of fuel. I had made tests during the beta after corrections, and it could climb to 300 m in less than 30s after takeoff as indicated in the original R-5 manual, so i would say that it is quite close to reality now.

I stand corrected, then!

Ah ... my apologies ... deleting the target selections seems to be the answer to fixing the crashes in the TB-3 mission. So the problem is not as bad as I thought. It looks like the worst of it can be avoided with a bit of mission fixing.

It does still seem to have a few too many crashes in other missions where there is no target selection, but I haven't really had a good look at that.