Not to sound too critical here but both the lead and trailing Hornets should have reacted and turned into the Mig(s) in the merge sooner than they did. That late reaction placed the Hornets in an almost purely Defensive position which of course limited options to simply avoiding being fired on and shot down. The Mig-21 pilot had a near perfect missile envelop during much of the maneuvering and had they had all aspect weapons like the R-60(AA-8), the Hornet would have been toast. It all worked out in the end when the Mig bugged out and went straight and level (fatal mistake) for what I'd guess was a Bingo Fuel RTB. Rule of thumb, set up the merge & engagement to keep the enemy bogey in the forward half of the omnisphere of your nose. One other thing to remember, in certain scenarios, you can fly the Hornet down to very low airspeed at high AoA and force jets like the Mig-21 to overshoot when you're defensive. Just before to react in a timely manner to get that nose & AoA back to where you can recover enough airspeed to regain sufficient maneuvering authority to take back your advantage.