The nav? D.B

Hempy, no, that is a brain cell too far, 47 years ago.

I was more of a Firefox guy myself.

"It's a missile cruiser dead ahead and I don't have the fuel to go around it - so I'm going in at Mach 3 in full afterburner at 50ft, because that's max endurance in a Firefox".

Makes Top Gun look like a documentary.

I was a stude doing the combat phase of the F4 OCU when the film came out. Our course watched it and had a laugh at some of the sequences. I did get to use one of the "moves" many years later. On exercise, trying to find an EF111 over the North Sea, we managed to get visual with the Raven and proceeded to prosecute an unlocked guns attack, as they kept chucking the radar into a corner. After successfully filming the "kill" we passed them with a lot of overtake, inverted, communicating with "the bird". Just because we could.

Bruggen’s 14 Squadron aircrew watched Top Gun at Goose Bay in Canada while on an operational low flying exercise in preparation for Red Flag in October 1988:

‘Toward the end of the detachment the Boss invited the Base officers and their wives for drinks in the RAF bar on the ground floor of our accommodation block as a way of saying ‘thank you’ for looking after us so well. Flying finished at about midday because of poor weather and we all arrived back at our accommodation block together.

The Boss went to his room on the ground floor having reminded us all to be in the bar before 1700 hours to meet our guests. We headed upstairs to the large crewroom for a quick beer. Someone produced the not long-released Top Gun so we all grabbed a few cans and settled down to watch it.

That was it for the afternoon, beer followed beer, pilots sat next to their navigators, and the whole Squadron, minus the Boss, sat “enthralled” during the highs and lows of the film and the combats too. When Maverick’s navigator, Moose, was killed emotions ran high, with one or two crews sitting with their arms around one another’s shoulders. The film finished at about 1645. The Boss then looked in having found no one in the bar. It was not a pretty sight: His Squadron was well and truly wasted. He gave us five minutes to shower and change and be on parade! We made it too, it was a great party.’

(From Winged Warriors – The Cold War from the Cockpit by Paul McDonald)

Probably little known outside of Sweden but the same guy that did most of the the aerial photography in TG also did the same for a little known Swedish movie called "Älskar, älskar inte"
Copied quite a few of the moves, not using the Tomcat but a Viggen.

Break at 3:30 is just about as identical as you can make it!

Looks like Goose dies again at about 4:32.....


Or was it a gull??

I'm going to be sick



Shudder.


:E

Ah, but you have to remember that 3 years earlier it was a Jaguar squadron, so presumably the associated squadron traditions were still endemic....:ooh:

"Don't bend down....."