The opening bit in "Act of Contrition" where a drone accidentally breaks loose from a storage rack and spontaneously ignites is based on a real incident aboard the USS Forrestal where a missile accidentally ignited and hit several planes on the flight deck. The cadence-like chant the pilots were singing was a rewritten version of a chant sung by A-10 Thunderbolt pilots.
Starbuck splits her trainee pilots groups of two and tells them they're going to learn a maneuver called the "Thorch Weave". This is a reference to the "Thatch Weave", a two-plane defensive maneuver developed by U.S. Navy pilots during World War II.
This episode borrows a story element from the original series episode, Lost Planet of the Gods, in which the Galactica temporarily loses half its pilots to radiation sickness, and it's up to Starbuck and Apollo to emergency-train female cadets (including Apollo's wife and his sister) to fly Vipers for combat air patrol (CAP).
One of the paperback books Boomer knocks off the shelf when finding the bomb shelter in the restaurant is "The Warbirds" by Richard Herman, Jr., which revolves around a dwindling US Air Force fighter wing single-handedly fighting a small-scale conflict.
The episode bounces between the past where Starbuck was responsible for the death of Commander Adama's son Zack and the present where she is training new pilots and rattled by that past. One of her trainees is played by Bodie Olmos, the real son of Edward James Olmos who plays Adama.