Directed by Tony Scott, and produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, in association with Paramount Pictures, the 1986 Top Gun drama film is still the all-time favourite movie for every Aviation Geek.
The motion picture stars Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, with Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, and Tom Skerritt in supporting roles. Cruise plays Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a young naval aviator aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. He and his Radar Intercept Officer, LTJG Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Edwards) are given the chance to train at the US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School then at Naval Air Station Miramar (today Marine Corps Air Station Miramar) in San Diego, California.
The screenplay was written by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr., and Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer stated explicitly that the inspiration for Top Gun was an article titled “Top Guns”, written by Ehud Yonay and published in California magazine three years earlier.
The piece featured aerial photography by then-Lieutenant Commander C.J. “Heater” Heatley and told the story of Lieutenants Alex “Yogi” Hnarakis and Dave “Possum” Cully, an F-14 Tomcat aircrew from the Fighter Squadron 1 (VF-1) Wolfpack, as they attended the Topgun course at NAS Miramar.
Yonay took readers into the cockpit with incredibly vivid descriptions.
Think back to the days before the movie, before GoPro cameras and squadron videos on YouTube… You can almost “feel the need for speed” when Yonay describes what it was like for Yogi flying the badass F-14 Tomcat for the first time. “Yogi had flown jets in flight school – the T-2 Buckeye and A-4 Skyhawk – but moving up to the F-14 Tomcat meant crossing the magic line that separates the men from the boys, like first-time sex, glorious and terrifying,” Yonay says. “The difference is the afterburner, an engine component that at the (push) of a throttle begins to burn huge amounts of fuel at incredible speed, resulting in a burst of power that no ordinary jet engine can duplicate and no plane but a fighter ever needs. ‘Just getting into an afterburning aircraft is a sensation most attack guys will never know that feeling of power,’ says Lieutenant Rick (“Organ”) Hammond, a member of the Top Gun squadron. ‘The first time I lit the afterburner in an F-14, the airplane just, you know, just literally moved.’”
At the time the F-14 was “the U.S. Navy’s supreme air war machine, a huge, luxurious monster that could have been designed by the Star Wars special effects crew,” as Yonay described it. The Tomcat “could shoot up to 30,000 feet in one minute, fly at more than twice the speed of sound, and haul seven tons of guns and missiles – including the heatseeking Sidewinder, the radar-guided, mid-range Sparrow, and as many as six Phoenix missiles, half-ton monsters that can home in on a bomber more than 100 miles away. In fact, the F-14’s radar system can track 24 targets at once and fire six missiles in six different directions in rapid sequence. By comparison, the much smaller Russian MiG carries little more than guns and a few missiles, and must get quite close to a target – directly behind in order to use its heat-seeking Atolls – to hit it.”
But despite its incredible capabilities, the F-14 like every weapons system had its drawbacks, Yonay continues: “The plane’s enormous size is a disadvantage (it can be seen as far away as ten miles), and it is so technically complex that it takes between 20 and 25 hours of work by ground crews to keep it flying for just one hour.” Hence learning to fly and fight the Tomcat in combat was the main goal for both the F-14 aircrews and the U.S. Navy. This is where the Topgun school came in (and still does today). “It’s…
Read More: The story of the US Navy F-14 Tomcat aircrew that inspired the Legendary Top Gun