Mrs. POF and I went and saw “Top Gun” last night. I thought it was a real stinker from so many different angles from the very beginning. Mach 10? The SR-71 operated at Mach 3.2 and had many problems with skin and structural materials heating and keeping the cockpit cool. In the movie, the test pilot just brashly decides to push the craft as far as he can and at Mach 10.2 the plane suddenly has materials overheating problems arise? That’s ludicrous. At Mach 10 (7000 mph), materials will be in the neighborhood of 3,600 F, the hotspot at the nose of the vehicle. There is almost no support crew for the world’s fastest aircraft? Just four or five people in the control room?
Then, as you pointed out, they never used the traditional word “cockpit,” instead substituting the incredibly stupid “pilot in the box.” Does anybody actually say that? When I was young, “box” was slang for female private parts, so does changing “cockpit” to “box” actually change anything?
The diversity of the entire team really irked me with the way they checked every single box. Of course, they had to toss in an introverted, weird, small-stature white guy named “Bob” just like TV shows the stupid white dad in families. But they were stuck with all the over-machoed brawny white guy pilots.
The plot was SO formulaic. Washed-up, over-age Top Gun pilot made trainer, impossible to survive test plane crash, USA just unilaterally decides to attack another nation and destroy one nuclear enrichment site, silly mission objective to bomb one underground nuclear enrichment plant, brawny guys playing football on the beach, ogre know-nothing senior brass, fighter planes following impossible terrain up canyons, stealing an old Tomcat (all gassed up and ready to fly) from the enemy, young-buck love interest between two now-old people.
Sending in aging non-stealth F-18 fighter/bombers with just two munitions loaded on each aircraft? Why not drop precision guided bunker buster or hyperbaric bombs from stealth bombers at high altitude?
I thought it was a real stinker from beginning to end. At least the flight scenes in the last 30 minutes were fun to watch (if you totally suspended your disbelief).
The first scene about breaking the speed record is actually lifted from Gen. Chuck Yeagers life. It was included in the movie The Right Stuff. Yeager decides on a whim to go for the speed record, tower hears it’s Yeager and assumes he’s clear because, hey, its Yeager after all. He then breaks the speed record and the plane disintegrates around him. Only difference is that Yeager was hospitalized with sever burns which occurred after ejection when his chute caught fire.