‘Top Gun’: Maverick’s Fighter Plane Stunts Push The Limits Of Physics

At an elite US Navy fighter jet training school in “Fightertown USA”, students compete to outclass the other pilots in the class. That means not only following orders, but showing off your most daring flying skills. After all, this is top gunthe big screen hit of the 1980s.

Now, Paramount Pictures studios will bring the familiar fighters and their cheeky pilots back to the big screen on May 27 with Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel. But how realistic are the incredible aerobatics depicted in the two movies? Are maneuvers such as flips, shots into the sky, and flips over another plane feasible in real life?

The original aircraft top gun made realistic movements

“It might surprise you to learn that the first film is actually quite realistic in terms of physics and maneuvers,” says the stunt pilot. Bernard Malfitano a Popular Mechanics by email. “They shot most of the movie with real planes doing real flights, not scale models or CGI.”

Pilots can perform most aircraft scenes, including dogfight maneuvers, known as dogfighting. An example seen in the film is the “rolling scissors“, intended to gain a positional advantage against an enemy aircraft.

Malfitano is an aeronautical engineer and a private pilot since 2011, which means that he knows the ins and outs of the Acrobatic flight. Fly stunt planes with technically precise movements that push the limits of what a small plane can do.

Tom Cruise, who plays Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and his co-stars didn’t have to become stunt pilots, of course. However, they did fly in the planes alongside trained pilots during the filming of top gun. For the sequel, the actors spent three months training to withstand the G-forces they would experience in the air so they could shoot scenes in real F-18 fighters.

According to the film’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, Cruise was the only able to withstand G-forces of piloting a fighter jet, which can experience as many as eight or nine G’s, meaning pilots feel eight to nine times the force of gravity. Trained pilots can withstand even greater forces if they carry G-suits specials that constrict the legs and abdomen with an air bladder to keep blood in the upper body during high-G maneuvers.

Malfitano knows the risks of aerobatic maneuvers. Causing your plane to go into a spin is something real pilots might do intentionally, though it carries the risk of the plane crashing. So when Maverick is shown going into a spin, it’s not a real plane you see on screen, but a mock-up.

This was one of the few scenes that was impossible to film with real planes, since people’s lives would be in danger. For example, planes explode, an F-14 goes into a spin, and missiles are fired at planes in the first movie. The Navy also didn’t want to release many missile footage at the time, says Malfitano.

“The glaring exception (to an actual maneuver) is the scene where the F-14 rolls inverted right on top of the F-5/MiG-28, so close that the F-14’s vertical stabilizers would be on either side of the F-14’s.” another plane. Even if that is physically possible, it is so precarious that the situation could probably move away from the pilots (for example, bringing the planes closer) more quickly than the pilots would be able to react”, explains Malfitano, who offers a “mini bachelorin aeronautical engineering.

At airshows, two pilots simulate this maneuver by holding one plane farther away than the other, he says; in other words, it is pretendedbecause it is too dangerous to actually do it.

“So even though the description of top gun of the life of a naval aviator is not exceptionally well written, the flight is almost all very realistic,” he says.

The sequel is updated with the F/A-18, but the movements are less realistic

However, this is not the case in the sequel. Between the first and the second film of top gun, Tom Cruise became a real pilot. That’s why Malfitano was surprised to see that the maneuvers of the planes that appear in the trailer for the sequel are less realistic.

Hollywood has become obsessed with flipping fighters, he says. However, “it’s barely possible today with thrust vectoring,” that is, the ability of an aircraft to change the direction of its engine’s thrust to control the aircraft’s altitude or angular velocity. This technology did not appear until the 1990s. Although the new film Top Gun: Maverick is supposed to take place in the current era, it’s still a difficult feat to do a backflip.

One of the trailers for the sequel shows a Sukhoi Su-57 aircraft performing a move called Pugachev Cobra and a horizontal flight turn, both of which are possible with suitable aircraft such as the Su-57 and F-22. During this move, first performed by Soviet test pilot Viktor Pugachoyov in 1989, the pilot brings the aircraft’s nose fully vertical, or even beyond. Going that far back in an airplane without thrust vectoring means that the pilot relies on drag towards the tail of the airplane to bring the nose forward again. Therefore, the aircraft must have a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than one. With thrust vectoring aircraft, it’s a bit easier, but still, the engines must run hard enough all the time to maintain the aircraft’s altitude, despite loss of speed and lift.

In the sequel, the F/A-18s are also shown performing a movement similar to that of a Pugachev Cobra, which is not possible unless the F/A-18s have thrust vectoring nozzles added to the rear. Malfitano points out.

For him, the most intriguing scenes in the second film show Maverick in a pressure suit piloting what looks like a hypersonic plane. Lockheed’s SR-72, Boeing’s Mach 5 passenger transport, and Reaction Engines’ Skylon all have configurations somewhat similar to the mystery plane in the trailer, Malfitano notes.

Several companies are working on engines that combine a jet and a ramjet, or a jet and a rocket. These engines can push a vehicle fast enough to propel a single-stage vehicle into orbit, “a true ‘space plane’ that doesn’t need to be launched from a mothership and doesn’t need to jettison booster stages on its way to orbit.” up,” explains Malfitano.

Maybe Top Gun: Maverick introduce an innovative new aircraft design that remains a bit futuristic to inject even more excitement into the sequel. It’s an intriguing scene in the trailer, according to Malfitano. So maybe it’s okay, or even ideal, that the planes in this movie defy physics. In any case, it will surely provoke many more expressions of amazement among the public.