Due to overwhelming demand from readers, I am going to review the new Tom Cruise movie, Top Gun: Maverick.
I’m probably the only guy you will ever run into who has flown Mach 2.5 at 90,000 feet, and with 50 years of experience as a combat pilot, it’s safe to say I know my way around a cockpit, all of them.
For a start, they put Top Gun in the wrong state. The Naval Fighter Weapons School moved from North Island, San Diego to far cheaper Fallon Nevada in 1996, where I got my first Covid-19 shot.
But North Island definitely makes a much more scenic backdrop for a romantic backstory, the part where I fell asleep. I know it well and have given many speeches to graduating Top Gun and Naval Seal classes there over the years. You can’t beat those white sand beaches.
Let’s start with the stuff that doesn’t exist. The scramjet that Maverick takes to Mach 10.4 at the beginning of the movie probably won’t fly for another 20 years, it ever. In 2004, an unmanned test of the NASA X-43 scramjet did fly for ten seconds over the Pacific at Mach 10 and then crashed into the ocean.
There is work underway at the Lockheed Skunk Works at Edwards Air Force Base in California (you can see a skunk on the tail of Tom Cruise’s plane), but it’s so secret even I don’t know about it. My friend there, Kelly Johnson, passed away 32 years ago so no more inside tips. When this thing does fly, it will get you from New York to Tokyo in two hours.
The US does have a fifth-generation stealth fighter, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II that can go up against the Chinese Chengdu J-20 and the Russian Sukhoi-57 and beat them hands down. The F-35 can fly Mach 1.6. The movie implies only the enemy has these advanced planes, forcing our heroes to fly the ever-reliable, but constantly ungraded 44-year-old McDonnel Douglas F/A 18.
It is true that the military will pull old pilots out of retirement for special missions. I am a perfect example. When a pilot joins the military it’s for life and the only way to retire is to die in a crash. Maverick is retrieved from working on a WWII P51 Mustang, which I also fly.
This is because the military never throws anything out and will keep flying planes as long as they can find pilots. Our oldest flying B-52 Stratofortress is 70 years old, is slated to fly for 100 years in total, and was originally designed by Nazi Germany.
I thought the movie did a very accurate representation of high G-forces, which absolutely beat the crap out of you and are fatal above a reading of 10 where your internal organs explode. I have flown G-forces up to 10, and at that pressure, I weighed 2,000 pounds and my arms were so heavy I couldn’t reach the controls. I thought my Russian co-pilot was trying to kill me.
The same is true of the extreme aerobatics in the film, which are exhausting. Sometimes pilots have to be lifted out of their seats after such maneuvers.
Despite these factual transgressions, I enjoyed the movie, even though I spent half the movie saying to myself, “No way.” You can see they had massive support from the Navy and even had Blue Angle pilots flying the aerobatic and combat scenes (Tom Cruise was cut and pasted into the cockpit.) Sure, it was a stretch for them to steal a 52-year-old F-14 swing wing Tomcat and land it on a carrier. This is fiction after all. But it is all about us oldies.
That’s because many of the current Navy leadership were inspired to join by the first Top Gun movie in 1986 in which a much younger Tom Cruise also starred. It became the greatest Navy recruiting device of all time. It’s no surprise the Navy was all over this one like a wet blanket, lending them a squadron on F/A 18’s with real Top Gun pilots. How much did that cost?
Top Gun: Maverick has been far and away the biggest box office blockbuster of 2022 and signaled the return of many moviegoers for the first time since the pandemic. Call it a coming-out party for all of us. A Top Gun Barbie Doll has even hit the stores.
Sure Tom Cruise is getting old (59), but who am I to complain?
A Soviet Mig-29
My Russian Copilot
