Reply #14: Speaking of fiction, the broken radio on the scout plane...

[Deep13]

...seems like a Hollywood creation to me. The real problem for the Japanese Navy (JN) is that they were so convinced that the two surviving USN carriers (they did not know the Yorktown had been fixed) were still hanging around Hawaii that they made only a half-adzed attempt to find them. There were few JN planes used and each had to cover huge areas of ocean with a single pair of peepers. It would have been a shot in the dark to find them. OTOH, the USN used proper scouting planes and used a lot of them. Unlike the JN, the USN knew for sure the JN was coming and about where to look for them.

As far as the vulnerability, the JN attacked ships with torpedoes. Unlike the USN's or the German's, Japanese torpedoes were actually reliable, so there was no back-up for aerial bombing. When it became clear that USN carriers were present, they had no choice but to swap over to torpedoes. And when fighters came close to running out of gas, the attack planes had to wait until they all landed. That meant a deck stacked with bombs and gasoline. Another thing that killed the JN was their aggressive, officer-driven mindset. JN personnel were trained to attack, not to defend. They had no appreciable damage control system and if men were separated from officers by fire or other damage, they really had no idea what to do. Some of those JN carriers were sunk with a single bomb. OTOH, the USN placed heavy reliance on damage control. This is what allowed them to save the Yorktown after Coral Sea and to keep it fighting after it was attacked.

So while luck played a factor, I don't think it was as fantastic as the film made it seem.