The script? Ludicrous. The flying scenes? Breathtaking. Plus, plenty of interesting airplanes for aviation fans.
Tom Cruise stars as U.S. Navy test pilot and fighter instructor Pete Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick. For aviation fans, the flying scenes are spectacular, and are done without the computer-generated animation typically used for adventure films today. The film also references a fictional hypersonic aircraft called Dark Star, and even includes the famous Lockheed Martin Skunk Works logo on the tail. It’s a nod to the future of aviation, and the decreasing role that skilled pilots will likely have in future military aircraft operations.
Jim Anderton comments.
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Last night I saw the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, Top Gun: Maverick, and if you’re an aviation fan, there is plenty of spectacular footage of F-18s—and a little Easter egg for hard-core plane spotters.
The film is the sequel to the 1986 original, Top Gun, with Tom Cruise playing an older but otherwise substantially the same fighter pilot from the U.S. Navy’s Top Gun fighter training program. The key plot element—spoiler alert—is the need for crews to train a new generation of aggressive young naval aviators to undertake a very dangerous mission to bomb an enemy nuclear installation.
The enemies are never mentioned, but Cruise and his wingman later steal an F-14 fter their aircraft are shot down in combat. As aviation buffs know, the only nation in the world that still operates F-14s today is Iran; but for the movie, the mythical enemy also has very dangerous “fifth-generation” fighters. While the movie doesn’t get into the details of what makes a jet fighter “fifth-generation,” which is the combination of stealth and advanced avionics, it does imply that fourth-generation jets like the F-18 are unlikely to survive a confrontation with this modern technology.
The fifth-generation opposing aircraft aren’t real, but they look very much like the Russian Sukhoi Su-57, following a long Hollywood tradition of portraying America’s enemies as operators of Russian equipment. Like all action-adventure movies, there are plot holes you could fly a 747 through, but a lot of the details are really authentic.
G-induced loss of consciousness, or G-LOC, is a serious problem, and both pilots and aircraft have been lost due to the blackouts that result. G-suits were designed in the 1950s to help alleviate this by using a system of inflatable tubes that trap the blood in the torso during high-speed manoeuvres, and a Dassault Rafale engineer told me 10 years ago that they used a system that monitored the pilots’ consciousness and restored the airplane to straight and level flight if he or she passes out.
The movie also describes extremely low-level flying as the solution for radar avoidance in non-stealth aircraft, which is true and was a standard tactic as far back as World War II. Operating high-performance fighter aircraft low and fast is extremely dangerous, and in the aerial sequences, condensation behind the wing upper surface shockwaves is clearly visible, so the pilots were indeed approaching the kind of speeds where compressibility is a factor.
And by the way, at sea level the speed of sound is about 740 miles an hour, depending on factors like temperature and barometric pressure, so it’s plenty fast. During the F-14 takeoff and dogfighting scenes, Maverick is seen extending and retracting the F-14’s swing wings to shorten takeoff roll and improve manoeuvrability. This is especially interesting, as swing wing technology has been abandoned in fighter aircraft design, and is today seen only in large bombers like the B-1.
The reasons why make an interesting story by itself, and I’m sure I’ll get around to talking about it in a later episode.
The Easter egg I mentioned earlier comes at the beginning of the movie, when Maverick is test flying a mythical hypersonic aircraft called Dark Star. In the plot, it operates at Mach 10, and while this is far faster than any air-breathing crewed aircraft can achieve, the script accurately portrays the transition from turbojet to supersonic combustion ramjet operation for high-speed flight. Scramjets are the basis for all air-breathing hypersonic vehicles, including the so-called “carrier killer” missiles under high-priority development in the U.S., China and Russia today.
The Dark Star is mythical, but the aviation community has pondered over the lack of a replacement for the SR 71 Blackbird, now retired, but still the recordholder for the fastest crewed aircraft. Speculation about the existence of the secret replacement being tested at places like Area 51 in Nevada has existed for decades, and as the movie aircraft taxis past the screen, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works logo is clearly visible.
The Skunk Works is the secret development operation pioneered by Lockheed in World War II to develop the then-new XP 80 turbojet fighter plane. Legendary reconnaissance aircraft such as the U-2 and SR 71 were developed there, as was the first stealth aircraft, the F-117. We haven’t heard much from the Skunk Works lately, which itself arouses suspicion in the aviation community.
Is Top Gun: Maverick a movie you may want to see? Well, the plot is implausible, and the script is ludicrous. But this movie was clearly produced by people that understand airplanes, and it was done with very little CGI trickery. A final scene shows Tom Cruise flying a beautiful P 51, and it’s pretty clearly him at the controls. If you pilot airplanes, engineer them or just like watching them in action, it’s a good time movie.
