Code One Magazine: Top Gun

Top Gun photo Fifteen seconds of fame can have lasting effects. Almost a decade after Top Gun the movie blew audiences away with slick aerial cinematography and sizzling astrophysicists, the public relations office at the Navy Fighter Weapons School — the real-life Top Gun — is still awash with visit requests.

Commander Robert McLane (today's counterpart of Tom Skerritt's supporting role as "Viper") is not complaining. "The movie brought us name recognition," says McLane. "The Fighter Weapons School and the Navy received a lot of good press from the movie. It did a lot of good for us. The movie showed the glamorous and exciting side of Naval aviation. Sure, we are constantly having to give tours as a result. But we owe that to the public."

McLane saw the movie when it debuted in 1986. "My children were in junior high at the time," he recalls. "The movie was completely separate from their reality. They knew what dad did. They'd seen me fly in the same airplanes on the screen. But the movie was larger than life. They didn't connect what I did with the movie."

The movie was separate from most realities. Those "MiGs in the opening aerial scene, for example, were F-5s painted bad-guy black. Unlike real-life pilots, the movie's aviators rarely strapped on their oxygen masks and never lowered their visors. Most aerial engagements at the school were filmed well below the expressed "10,000-foot minimum altitude" (which in real life is set at 5,000 feet). There is no such thing as a Top Gun trophy. And PhD astrophysicists rarely sizzle. In other words, the movie was far from a documentary. While civilian audiences may have noted a few inconsistencies, Naval aviators had to suspend disbelief from the highest yardarm.

Capt. Mike Manuche, an instructor pilot at Top Gun, has seen the movie twice. "I first saw it with a group of Navy and Marine pilots," Manuche admits. "We picked it apart. It is like a policeman watching a police movie. You sit in the theater and say, 'Oh, that could never happen.' The second time, when I saw it with some civilian friends, I decided it was pretty fun. I appreciated the photography. A movie can be fun to watch even though it doesn't bear much on reality.

The reality for both instructors and students is an intense six-week course that sharpens the air-to-air skills of the Navy's best fighter crews. "The movie is actually fairly accurate in this respect," says Commander McLane. "The folks who come here are hand-picked by their squadrons. We tend to get the top performers. We make them better by giving them a view of the latest and greatest tactics and threats."

Today many are asking what the threat is. "All the services are wrestling with that question," admits McLane. "We're facing a changing world and a changing threat. We also have a changing environment at home. Our rationale for doing business may not be valid anymore. It costs a lot to train these aircrews. We have to show that the country is getting its money's worth.

"The Navy perspective has always been a little different from the Air Force," McLane continues. "Our carriers are deployed all over the world, so we get a firsthand look at a lot of peripheral countries, third world countries. Our course changes all the time to reflect what we see going on in the world.

Many of these changes concern the proliferation of ex-Soviet hardware. "We're seeing a greater willingness for republics of the former USSR to sell military equipment to foreign countries," McLane explains. "They will sell just about anything they have for hard currency. Today you and I can go out and buy ourselves a MiG-29. It may not run very long because you can't easily get spare parts for it. But we can go get one. They are also selling advanced weapons for existing aircraft. Countries can make their older aircraft more deadly by simply upgrading their missiles. I think we're kidding ourselves if we assume that these countries can't do a good job with this equipment against our equipment. "

And technology alone may not be the deciding factor. "As sophisticated as our airplanes are," explains Manuche, "an engagement often boils down to who sees whom first. In World War II, you couldn't be shot down by anyone who was outside of 1,000 to 1,500 feet. So if you saw someone a mile away, you had an advantage, time to react and make a decision on how to attack or defend against an attack. So sight was very important. Although missiles that can hit targets beyond visual range give the opposite impression, sight is even more important today. If you are within visual range, you now have the ability to kill an adversary from where you are. You can't shoot someone down thirty miles away unless you can identify them as the enemy. What you see on the radar may or may not be the enemy. Also, radars are not all-seeing. You need to be able to look to the sides and behind you. And those are skills that come with experience and training."

Five people on McLane's staff gained experience in the Gulf War. "While they may not have seen much air-to-air action in Desert Storm," says McLane, "there is something to be said for being shot at and being able to work under those conditions and remain calm, cool, and collected. They can transfer these qualities into the air-to-air arena. Aircrews that have been through combat are pretty competent. They're leaders."

Lt. Rick Claggett flew almost forty combat missions in the Persian Gulf. "In combat, you lean back on your training," Claggett says. "You want to train as hard as you can so that it naturally takes over when you go into combat. The basics were there for me when I needed them; I didn't have to think about them.

"But we shouldn't learn too many lessons from the war," warns Claggett. "Because the air war was such a success, training may suffer. The perception may be that we are so good that we can slack up a bit. The truth is that the Iraqis were just not that good at their job."

Training time for Navy and Marine aircrews is normally spent in many ways. Much of it goes to air-to-ground practice, air-to-air instrument flying, and low-level training. "You have only so much flying time," McLane says. "When you have to worry about landing on a boat in the middle of the night, you have to spend some of those precious flight hours making sure that you're going to clear the ramp and hit the wires. That's life-or-death training. And it eats up flight time.

"Navy and Marine pilots receive air-to-air training when they are at sea, but it is spread out," continues McLane. "When your primary mission is strike warfare, air-to-ground warfare, you spend less time sharpening your air-to-air skills. At Top Gun, aircrews receive very focused training on air-to-air warfare. They fly at least once a day, sometimes twice. Then we go into our briefing and debriefing and analyze the hops in detail."

Capt. Tim Curry, a student pilot at Top Gun, is in his third week of the course. "The great thing about this school is that the bogies are professional bogies," Curry says. "The presentation you get here is much better than the one you get in the fleet. There is no comparison. It is much more accurate and realistic. Out in the fleet you'll set up scenarios with other squadrons, but nobody really wants to play the adversary. Here you'll encounter dedicated bandits who execute the gameplan as realistically as the threat would."

Curry, a Marine F-18 pilot, is one of eight pilots going through the current Top Gun class. The Fighter Weapons School trains about forty fighter aircrews every year. Candidates for the course must have 400 hours in their particular aircraft and have been deployed on a carrier for at least one six-month deployment. Their commanders look for pilots with good stick-and-throttle abilities and potential to become good instructors. To put what they've learned to use, those selected must also return to their squadron for another deployment, usually as training officers.

"Timing has a lot to do with the selection," says McLane. "You may have superstars in your squadron - pilots who would make exceptional teachers - but they may be on their way to another squadron. The selection process is a matter of finding the best people at a given time." The school holds five courses every year for the crews of eight aircraft in each course - usually a mix of four Navy F-14s, two Navy F-18s, and two Marine F-18s.

"We work with integrated units called air wings," McLane explains, "what the Air Force calls a composite wing. When the Navy mans a carrier, it sends an air wing. The components of the wing work together between deployments (called turnarounds). The unit will have an EA-6 squadron, an E-2 squadron, two F-18 squadrons, two F-14 squadrons, an A-6 squadron, a helo squadron, and an S-3 squadron. The F-18s, F-14s, and the E-2s tend to work closely during the turnaround. At the Fighter Weapons School, we try to get two F-18 crews and two F-14 crews, several air intercept controllers, and an E-2C naval flight officer from an air wing for each class."

The fighter instruction begins with one week of classwork. Students are brought up to date on the latest information on radar systems, aircraft and weapon upgrades, and threat performance. This portion of the course is also attended by Navy and Air Force active-duty and reserve pilots.

"We exchange a great deal of information with the Air Force in our day-to-day operations," says McLane. "We have one Air Force exchange officer as a permanent member of our staff as well."

In the second week, students start flying one-on-one (called 1v1) engagements against the instructors piloting adversary aircraft. Every sortie involves a series of air-to-air engagements. "We aren't teaching just the basics of 1v1," says Manuche, a Marine pilot who went through the course himself in 1991. "We expect them to perform well out there. We are teaching the finer points of 1v1. We're teaching aircrews how to get the most out of training sorties as opposed to simply going out and blasting opponents out of the sky. Experience alone may make aircrews better. But they'll get better a lot faster with good training.

"We're not only judging the way they fly but also the way they talk about their flights," Manuche continues. "If a pilot heats me in a 1v1 encounter, I want him to be able to show me how he did it. I want to hear why he did what he did. I also want him to be able to do the same if he loses. Students must be able to reconstruct engagements and identify transitions from offensive or defensive to neutral. We want them to take these debriefing skills back to their squadrons and use them with their junior pilots."

The aerial encounters increase in complexity as the course progresses. The lvl encounters become 2v2 in the third week. By the sixth week, students are flying as a composite force in packages of four to eight aircraft against an enemy of unknown strength. "We begin by showing them some threats that are not going to do a very good job flying their equipment," says McLane. "Then we raise the ante. At the other end of the spectrum, we'll show them a MiG-29 with radar missiles and a well-trained pilot with a very aggressive mindset. If we don't train to the most capable threat, we're shortchanging ourselves."

The hardware behind that most capable threat happens to be Top Gun's F-16N Fighting Falcons, which the unit has been flying since 1987 (the year after the movie was released).

"We can simulate the MiG-29 and Su-27 and other advanced aircraft very well with the F-16," says McLane, who has over 3,000 hours in the F-14 Tomcat and 150 hours in the Fighting Falcon. "The F-16 was a major leap for the adversary mission into what we call fourth-generation aircraft. We had the biggest engine available at the time put in it and we beefed it up structurally. Most of our hops are pretty dynamic. And we don't give the jets much of a rest in between. Overall, the airplane has been very reliable and we've had very few problems with it on a day-to-day basis.

McLane often gets asked about the follow-on for the unit's F-16s. "I don't think there is one," he says. "I can't imagine anything else that we can use in that role in the next five to seven years. My answer has a lot to do with the F-16's low cost per flight hour. The Navy has looked at some alternatives, including Russian aircraft - the MiG-29 in particular. Its biggest liability is logistics. How do you get a logistics pipeline going? Who will repair the airplanes? With the F-16, we don't have that problem. The US Air Force has thousands of them - a great database. And we get great support from the Lockheed Air Services Company." (Interestingly, Lockheed personnel maintain Top Gun's four Grumman F-14s as well as its eight F-16s.)

Although it is not a firm requirement, most Top Gun instructors have graduated from the school. According to McLane, the school looks for flying abilities and teaching skills when selecting instructors. "Stick-and-throttle abilities, however, are not at the top of the list," says McLane. "We expect Navy and Marine pilots to already have these skills. We want people who are articulate, intelligent, and willing to work hard. Everyone here works six or seven days a week. We take two holidays off a year, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We work every other holiday. After a couple of classes, the instructors become comfortable with the pace."

The Fighter Weapons School is a three-year assignment for instructor pilots. "The first year they are getting their feet on the ground," explains McLane. "The second and third year, they are adding value to our operation; we're getting a return on our investment."

The first year is probably the toughest for the instructors. They have to quickly become expert in a particular subject, such as radar systems, weapons, and threat tactics. Capt. Manuche, for example, specializes in the F-18's radar, the APG-65. "You have to do a lot of research to put a lecture together," he says. "Then you have to practice the lecture in front of two or three instructors at a time until every instructor has seen it. They critique it and make suggestions. Eventually you perform a dress rehearsal in front of the whole staff. So you better know what you're talking about. They decide if you are ready. Usually their critique lasts as long as the lecture. It's tough." Manuche gives his radar lecture five times a year to the classes and takes his show on the road to other Naval and Marine air stations.

Like their students, Top Gun instructor pilots are either F-18 or F-14 qualified. New instructors go through a familiarization phase to reacquaint themselves with the A-4, which they encountered in Navy flight school. Soon after that, they transition into the F-16. The ground portion of the F-16 transition training is usually conducted at MacDill AFB in Florida or Luke AFB in Arizona.

The flying portion of the transition training begins with two flights in the two-seat aircraft (in the Navy, it's called the TF-16N) and nineteen instructor training flights in the single seater. The transition tends to be easier for the F-18 pilots than it is for the F-14 pilots. "The F-18 guys are accustomed to a single seat," says Manuche, who transitioned to the F-16 in late 1992. "They have also used a state-of-the-art head-up display. We're also used to fly-by-wire flight control systems. It's a fairly easy transition to make."

When talking to a Top Gun instructor who has come from an F-18 cockpit, it is difficult to avoid direct comparisons between the F-16 and F-18. Most pilots handle the differences diplomatically. "Having flown against the F-16 when I went through Top Gun, it was nice to actually get in the airplane and fly it," says Manuche. "I really liked the high thrust-to-weight ratio. Every fighter pilot likes to go fast, and this plane is especially good at low altitude. The F-16's seating arrangement and visibility are also very nice. It is a fun plane to fly and a very good adversary aircraft. It has a nice radar for adversary work. We fly with the APG-66, which is the F-16A radar. Most Air Force pilots are flying with an APG-68 now - which is even better.

Lt. Claggett made the F-18/F-16 transition almost two years ago. "Being able to fly another fourth-generation airplane is one of the attractions for coming here," says Claggett. "The F-16 is a speed merchant. I love the ability to go 800 knots. That was never possible in the F-18. The F-16 is an easy airplane to learn to fly, especially the way we fly it. That is, we don't fly all the various air-to-ground missions. We're strictly air-to-air. Plus F-18 experience certainly makes it easier to transition into the F-16 because a lot of the same ideas went into these airplanes.

"On both planes," says Claggett, "the flight controls are so simple almost anyone can fly the airplanes after a couple of rides in the simulator. It has to be that simple because of all the decisions a pilot has to make. You don't have time to concentrate on the basics of flying. The alpha limit may frustrate F-18 pilots. Sometimes you want to point the nose and the F-16 won't let you do it. But the limiter has some strong advantages, too. The airplane takes care of its pilot; it won't let you get into a hole. It helps you make the right decision. With the F-18, you can make some major mistakes if you don't thoroughly understand what you're doing.

"The sidestick controller really bothered me at first," Claggett continues. "I'd be distracted and make a grab for a stick that wasn't there. After a while, though, it becomes natural. I wasn't a fan of the sidestick before. Now I wish the F-18 had one. The visibility between your legs would certainly be improved in the Hornet. In the F-18, you always have to look around the stick to see what's on the horizontal indicator. In the F-16, your office is in front of you. The things you need to see are in the open."

Claggett has over 1,000 hours in the F-18 and about 250 hours in the F-16. "We often fly the F-16 to its limits," he says. "If you can beat an F-16 at Top Gun, then you can beat anything out there. Nobody can do any better than this."

Visitors to the Navy's Fighter Weapons School may not see what they expect to see. They won't see many monster motorbikes parked in the lot. They won't see F-14s buzzing the control tower. And they won't see a bunch of fighter jocks vying for a top slot in the class. The overall theme of the movie, however, may compensate for its exaggerations and inaccuracies. The movie, after all, contrasts competition and independence against teamwork and maturity. By learning to be part of a team, Maverick Mitchell becomes a better pilot.

"We don't like to see a pair of airplanes splitting up," says Commander McLane. "We call it yoyo: you're on your own. We want to see aircraft working together out there. You get synergistic effects from teamwork - massed firepower, different sensors looking in different places, better self-protection. That's an important lesson that we teach here. And that's something that we want students to take back to their squadrons when they leave."