He only plays arcade but in his defence the OP is about Arcade battles
Propeller bombers gameplay has been completely broken in arcade for quite a while. I mean, it was always a PITA to spade them, but every now and then you used to get cloudy weather games (the old dense cloudy weather, not current one) and that allowed you to make some significant progress.
Nowadays, forget about it. There’s no such a thing as side climbing in arcade and never really was: fly area is too small, games end too early and the spotting mechanic makes it almost impossible to not be seen. Now you have to add that gunners are pretty useless, planes are obliterated by just spitting at them and awful map rotation throws dominations way too many times.
So you are stuck with the approach that GhostSoph said earlier: you pick a base and dive into it hoping to let the bombs out before other bombers of your team do or before an enemy destroys you, which will happen 40% of the times before you get to the base, 59% right after and the remaining 1% after you are able to drop a second load.
I stopped playing air a long while ago (it became extremely repetitive both with bombers and with fighters) but recently I took the PBM-5A to do the battle pass 20k mission score challenge and good lord: took me more than 2 hours to achieve it.
Until they expand the fly area and/or increase significantly bomber spawn altitude and extend game tickets/duration, you better stay away from playing bombers.
But nothing about this game is realistic so why quote a relation to reality? It arcade not even Air realistic which inst realistic either.
Air gunner shooting down fighters was about the only way of modifying a bomber especially as the targets are normally gone by the time you get to them
Im tired of this forum citing realism as and when it feels like it then screaming its not a sim anytime somebody asks for some common sense elements.
The bomber gameplay in AB is basically flying to 4-6m and hope no one’s intercepting you.
If there’s a mig-21s, sea vixen, f-89b, then just rush bomb before dying.