Tomcat RIO shares true story behind Top Gun’s famous inverted flight scene
‘Of course, for safety reasons, there wasn’t any aircraft flying inverted one above the other, and that iconic scene was obtained thanks to one of the few special effects in…
‘Of course, for safety reasons, there wasn’t any aircraft flying inverted one above the other, and that iconic scene was obtained thanks to one of the few special effects in…
The Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat fighter had been previously flown by LT Edward ‘Butch’ O’Hare, LCDR John Smith ‘Jimmy’ Thach, LT Noel A. Gayler, and LT Albert ‘Scoop’ Vorse, all Aces…
During their attack run, Sqn Ldr Pete Batson and Wg Cdr Mike Heath caught an Iraqi Air Force Mirage F1EQ landing on the runway instead of a “MiG” in their…
‘Fearing what two engines departing the plane might do to my aerodynamics, to say nothing of what would happen if they hit the tail on the way by, I shouted…
‘I immediately selected AB, rolled the aircraft inverted, and pulled. All this while keeping the SA-2s on the beam. I was at 25,000 [feet] when I started for the deck…
“The SR-71 Blackbird knew when your eyes started to wander to the spectacle of earth from 85,000 feet; that’s when something would go wrong,” Curt Mason, owner of Project Habu…
Lt Graham Squires reduced power to avoid overshooting the flying boat, but as he was about to cross over the H8K, its pilot pulled his aircraft up sharply in an…
‘When he later returned to the ship after his mission, he spent a long time cleaning his cockpit seat after he had abandoned his flight suit and showered, of course,’…
After making four passes over the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Essex, a wing of the Tu-16 Badger clipped the sea on the final pass, resulting in a crash that…
‘When the Hornet maxed out at Mach 1.6 (didn’t make its max), I was approaching Mach 2 and closing rapidly,’ Travis Brannon former F-4 Phantom II pilot with the US…