I'm beginning to get the impression, through careful examination of this episode and previous episodes, that the use of colours — Red, Blue, Green, Yellow — correlates to wireless-com designations, and isn't a formal delineation between groups/squadrons. It would appear that Pegasus, indeed all battlestars, have a pool of pilots that are assigned to flights. Those flights are per battlestar. Such that, Pegasus has a Red, a Blue, a Green, a Yellow. Galactica has a Red, a Blue, etc. (if a ship of her age has an equal capacity to Mercury-class battlestars is not quite yet known). Heck, if battlestar Hector (completely arbitrary name) was to show up, the safe bet is that it too would have a Red, a Blue, a Green, and a Yellow. The colour-name is not unique.
Are there other clues? Yes. In this episode especially, Starbuck "assigns" section/squadron "leads" on the fly. If these colour groups were actually formal entities, it would stand to reason they would have a formal internal structure, with their own squadron leader, and second, and so forth. Those positions would not be assigned by the overall group leader, nor defined in action. Instead, the overall group leader (Starbuck, in this example) would say, "Lima (arbitrary name), take your flight/squadron/unit that way... " instead of "Lima, take Green that way." Make sense?
Star Wars fell into this pitfall. It has been stated, numerous times, that Lucas modelled space combat after WWI and WWII air combat, with a great deal of cues taken from RAF terminology. The RAF does this exact thing, wherein they have a formal squadron (such as No. 85 Squadron) name on paper, but when in operations, they call them by colour on the radio, such as "Red flight" or "Gold squadron". This colour does not follow that squadron around, and on any given day, they could be a different colour, depending on the mission profile and the units involved.
In the case of BSG, here, I think that, for the sake of coordinated communication, they (Colonial staff) designate a group/squadron by colour, but when formality is concerned, the involved pilots are part of the greater whole — that being a pilot associated with Pegasus, or Galactica, or Hephaestus.
If anything, this article could/should be merged or re-categorized into "terminology", and explained as wireless terminology used in flight operations. -- Hawke 11:17, 21 February 2006 (EST)