The Battle of Yavin (according to SW Wikia) involved 30 Rebel starfighters. All but 3 were destroyed.
I counted roughly 25 pilots (plus Luke Skywalker)in the briefing room.
The medal ceremony featured at least 45 pilots celebrating.
Does that mean that the Rebellion had around 70 pilots for the Battle of Yavin but only used less than half?
Did they all not have ships?
If there were limited number of ships, why did they let a moisture farmer who no one had seen fly a ship up until that point take one of the precious few starships they had?
If they had plenty of ships, why did they send the guy who just walked in the door with no previous experience on the most important mission of their young rebellion’s existence?Is there an official explanation as to why Red and Gold Squadron were essentially wiped out but there were probably one or two more squadrons at the Yavin ceremony that went unused?
To add on to this, what little we do hear about his piloting ability implies he should’ve been killed during the mission. He doesn’t seem to have an inkling of understand how to fly anything that wasn’t atmospheric (“I thought you said this thing was fast, why don’t you outrun 'em?”), let alone combat ready (“what’s that flashing?” when looking at the shield output. Even if his little T-16 had a similar layout to an X-Wing, I doubt that it had anywhere near same sort of sensory equipment)
All we have to go by with for his own flying ability up to that point is him boasting about his ability, and self boasting doesn’t mean much. It makes you wonder why Luke was brought along, if you’re not looking at it from a sense of narrative, in which case: Who else would you have as our PoV character in the climax?
This is why I wish our heroes weren’t wearing the same clothes during the briefing scene as they were the rest of the film. It would make it seem that a bit of time had passed and Luke could have had a a little training with the X-Wing. This is what happened in my mind. We don’t know how fast the DS moves, so it wouldn’t create any problems if Luke and CO. were on Yavin a couple days before the battle.
In the the 1981 radio play adaptation of ANH Biggs puts Luke through a flight simulator test which qualifies him to join the DS attack.