Fighter Pilot Breaks Down Flying Scenes from Movies | GQ

we happened to see a mig-28 do a for g- dive negative for G's your head would explode hey my name is Matthew Buckley my call signs whiz I flew the fa-18 Hornet for the United States Navy for about 15 years I'm at home and you're watching the breakdown first up we have Pearl Harbor come back watching this gets my heart racing what these rave guys did the morning of December 7th 1941 reminds me of September 11th 2001 I was getting ready for my first flight as a pilot for American Airlines and I was also a pilot flying f-18 for the Naval Air Reserve out of Naval Air Station Fort Worth Texas and I knew we were under attack had jumped in my car raced out to the base one of my buddies got out there we called down to maintenance and said chief fuel the aircraft and we ended up briefing in their command post and as we were briefing two Navy guys for us 16 Air National Guard guys the Pentagon got hit it was my December 7th was 2001 so watching these guys get airborne and trying to protect the United States it definitely hits home to me very realistic it's my heart racing a little bit the procedure that they're going through right there to get into battle is pretty accurate for the situation that they're in clearly in fighter aviation you want to have a planning session you want to sit down and brief you want to tell the maintenance crews what time you're going to take off what type of weapon loadout you need in the aircraft obviously this morning all of that went out the window this was arm the aircraft we need to get airborne strapping in clear everybody out of the way so actually only five American fighter aircraft got airborne to face that Japanese onslaught yeah you'd be able to see not necessarily through the smoke immediately when you're in it but as you can see the Japanese pilots obviously had situational awareness system what was going on so from the ground it probably looks like a lot of smoke and they can't see well it's going to be speeds they're moving 100 200 miles an hour they're flying right through the smoke so they're in it and then briefly out of it so the smokes really no issue to them so this clip from Pearl Harbor is actually very very realistic there actually were two Army aviators that got airborne on the morning of December 7th George Welch and Kenneth Taylor you gotta love these two guys they were ready to dance and then they went to an all-night cocktail party and as they tell it 7:51 boom waking up to explosions two enemy aircraft racing overhead to being strafed and they hopped in that one guy's Buick still had their tuxedo pants out and they raced out to Hialeah airfield where they amande to p40 aircraft they got airborne and Welch was actually hit Japanese bullet hit his canopy went into his arm and the shrapnel went into his leg after getting wounded the guy shot down two Japanese aircraft they actually landed refueled got some more ammo and got airborne between those two absolute heroes they shot down six enemy aircraft which was just absolute incredible [Music] so that's a little sporty flying that low obviously there's telephone poles around there with the telephone wire and when you're moving at that speed if you hit a telephone wire you can lose your rudder or one of your control surfaces or go straight through you but there was some low-flying aircraft that day but that's putting dirt on the propeller so to speak so at this point both of them yelling that they both have enemy aircraft on their tail is a little of Master the obvious at this point so it really doesn't help too much during a combat situation which is tense enough already for you to be screaming over the radio let alone telling your buddy what he probably knows or he's going through right now so there's a little extra chatter over the radio at this point which probably doesn't add to anybody's situational awareness [Music] if you're dogfighting in practice and for real you want to be as close as you can to somebody it isn't necessarily chicken because somebody actually has to flinch because if you just stay pointing at each other both gonna get credited with a kill or a tear kill but you're also gonna both be dead so no chicken but makes thanks for good Hollywood so dogfighting is a term that we use to describe trying to get behind an enemy opponents what we call six o'clock directly behind them back in the day that's how you would try and shoot down your enemy opponent either with a gun or a missile in today's fighter aircraft you want to be shooting this guy down X amount of miles away we call it DVR beyond visual range these guys are in a dogfight right now in what we call wvr within visual range but this is this is a bad day at the office in current fighter aviation if you're having to play chicken with the enemy aircraft so in this scene it depicts I'd say the bravado and the heroism of fighter pilots your nation under attack and in the blink of an eye reacting if you notice in reality and in this movie they weren't waiting for their commanding officer to give them an order it was time to act so the enlisted personnel the ground crew arming the aircraft the guys hopping in the aircraft that's the spirit of fighter pilots up next we have Top Gun as a naval aviator and a graduate of Top Gun the adversary course if you even mention this movie in the ready room of a fighter squadron it's like a $50 fine or you have to buy every guy in the squadron a drink a lot of what goes on in this movie is just simply unrealistic great Hollywood but not not actually what goes on in the Naval Aviation I'm going from missile luck right off the bat here the guy in back goose in this case is what we call a Rio a radar intercept officer who in modern aircraft has been replaced by the computer so right now goose is being a high-speed cheerleader [Music] so what we're seeing on the screen right now is obviously a fake Hollywood eyes diversion of what we call the HUD the heads-up display and what maverick is attempting to do here and he was trying to select what we call a Sidewinder which is a heat-seeking missile so you'll hear throughout the movie various tones in maverick and goose headsets so all over the fighter aircraft we have like little dimples we call them so if anybody watching as a radar detector in their car you know that it gives different signals and different based on the strength and the band of radar same thing in a fighter aircraft and the missiles in this case a heat seeker that we call a Sidewinder is looking for the enemy's engine so it locks on that heat source and when it's locked on you get what we call a screamin tone actually in the f-18 Hornet once it's locked up like that it says shoot so it's got a video proof locked up shoot so if you see the enemy aircraft right there you heard a little tone and that guy's headset as well so enemy aircraft are kind of built like our aircraft and maybe we steal some of their plans they steal ours they're all may be built or have the similar systems and so in today's Fighter environment there's what we call secure communications or scrambled and so it is kind of a spy versus spy mentality it's all about trying to disable the enemy's ability to communicate or for their systems to work right I've wanted to jam this guy's radar so he can't lock me up so even if you're a pretty high ranking officer on an aircraft carrier ain't no smoking on board an aircraft carrier in the command and control center where there's very high-tech electronics we're not allowing any smoke to get into those things and break down in the 80s there was less sophisticated technology and believe it or not in the ready room in my fighter squadron still had ashtrays in him fighter pilots and smoking was kind of a thing but man that died out a while ago so it might have been semi acceptable on an aircraft carrier in the 80s that definitely not today so that tones going off in his headset and if you notice it was kind of a different tone than when maverick locked up the enemy so there's different tones in your headset and on your displays because there's different types of radar now if you're locked up by a radar and they're activating their potential missile launch now you're gonna get a screaming tone so you actually have to be pretty smart about what type of tone and also it's going to tell you based on that radar luck who it is or what type of aircraft or weapon that's about to get fired at as a fighter pilot this is where we throw some popcorn at the screen and screen if we're watching this so the guy is completely what we call defensive he's got an enemy aircraft at his six o'clock the enemy aircraft has a radar lock on him and is about to fire and the guy's saying hey can I can I shoot him down the f-14 Tom in the heat in the mid to early 80s did not have a missile that can take off and fly behind you and shoot the guy down behind so it's a little comical that at this point he's he's requesting permission to fire when he's about to get shot down and then the rules of engagement you have to get fired upon in order to defend yourself and shoot back there are some commander-in-chief's and some what we call ro e which is rules of engagement that say if you get locked up by an enemy's radar that is a target tracking or hey you're about to get killed type of radar that is considered a stole a Kuenn I flew over operation southern watch over southern Iraq that was one of our on our checklist the rules of engagement aren't written by the women and men in uniform they're written by guess what the politicians and military attorneys so this is a really interesting scene where hey don't fire unless fired upon well it looks like this guy's about to get fired upon so the f-14 Tomcat was defined as a air superiority fighter so the guy in the back in this case goose he is operating the radar system to lock up the aircraft and obviously the pilot and he talks over the radios so obviously maverick the pilot stick and rudder he's flying the airplane but in the Tomcat the the backseater goose could still fire an air-to-air weapon but in this case obviously within visual range and a dogfighting situation the pilot maverick would be the one shooting the gun and also firing the missiles so it's interesting in the movie Top Gun that we have maverick then we're gonna be Iceman and Wolfman and all these you know Gucci call signs so to speak let's just say that not most fighter pilots are running around with a callsign that they like or gave themselves my call signs whiz and it has nothing to do with intelligence and I'll leave it at that so usually you get your callsign by doing something stupid or it's a play on your last name we love to call science and Top Gun because ain't no Mavericks or Iceman or Wolfman farther around in navy marine or airforce aviation this is very Hollywood ish I'm on my way so the flying scenes just fantastic some people sitting here hey well you know why don't we why is he shooting this guy right now number one because of the rules of engagement the guy hasn't shot yet and also because he's got his wingman right in front of his wing windscreen and he can't shoot so apparently he's got to go have some fun with him [Music] first of all it was a single-seat Meg and mysteriously there's it's a two-seat make that just I guess a guy just magically popped up in the backseat also if you look at about how close the two aircraft are and some other scenes you can see that the f-14 Tomcat the tail has got to be at least 54 feet off the ground we jokingly called the title of the Tomcat the flying tennis court the the airplane was massive so at this point based on where the vertical stabilizer of the f-14 would be they would have already had a mid-air collision so this is just epically hysterical at this point obviously very Hollywood eyes you wouldn't be doing something like this later in the movie one of the funniest lines in this movie is hey you were in a negative for G dive with a mig-28 so if you don't know what negative G's R is like when you you're flying over the railroad tracks and and you get light in your seat or at the top of a roller coaster it's it's we call it eyes out G meaning positive G the Bloods leaving your head and you can pass out negative G the blood is actually going into your head and we call it eyes out G because he'll your eyes could pop out at a certain point a negative G negative couple jeez that's painful I mean I've had broken blood vessels in my eyes because of this negative 4 G's your head would explode it is so and not only negative 4 G's with your head pop off its brain stem they said you're in a negative for G dive it's physiologically and physically impossible to do what is depicted I crack myself up since your goose and you have nothing else to do as a backseater you probably would bring a Polaroid but now so we did have a camera that we take in the f-18 because you did need to take pictures sometimes of you know an enemy aircraft you'd intercept or even a suspicious vessel so Polaroid not so much real camera yeah we'd actually have cameras in the aircraft I was a junior in high school when the first movie came out and I knew since I wanted to breathe I wanted to be a Navy fighter pilot all of a sudden this movie came out and everybody including my mother wanted to be a Navy fighter pilot so it was great for recruiting for fighter aviation it's great theater we love it but at the end of the day maverick women lasted five minutes in a real fighter squadron I can't wait to see the the new one so I have a couple buddies who did a lot of the flying it's going to be good next up behind enemy lines [Music] okay so great clip here and behind enemy lines first of all this has got to be the longest time I've ever seen a surface-to-air missile fly these things can fly some of them five times faster than a fighter jet but this one seems to be able to fly for about an hour here and what we just saw was this f-18 put out a bunch of flares and also what we call chaff and also jamming pods if you're a heat-seeking missile you're staring at this engine heat I'm gonna go hit that engine and blow it up and all of a sudden a bunch of hotter things pop out if it's a radar missile and you're going after an aircraft and you're locked on and all of a sudden you see a bigger radar image pop up maybe you'll go lock on to that and away from the aircraft and the final thing that might be popping out of this aircraft is what we call jammers so little electronic jammers that hopefully scramble this missiles brains and make it not hit you so at this point these guys in this f-18 F are defensive they have the next 10 seconds of their life to try and decoy this missile so back on board the ship that's the probably what we call CIC the combat Information Center is at the heart of an aircraft carrier or a surface ship wherever the combatant commander is so whoever wherever the Admiral is or the commander of the battle group that's all that blue lighting or red lighting and all the sensors in that room they're probably writing down the aircraft's position time and getting the stats of what's going on in this engagement so this is a little bit more realistic than Top Gun you can see a little bit more that displays inside the aircraft it's tracking at you and giving you a little distance so you can tell the technology advantage that we have in the f-18 Hornet then we did over the f-14 still in this movie behind enemy lines we got a goose in the back this time another radar intercept officer they changed the term from Rio to WIZO weapons system operator so this guy in the back right now talking over the radio putting out chaff and flare and trying to help the pilot with some situational awareness but a little a little better than the movie Top Gun you can see what's going on in the aircraft so as I said we're on about our to of this missile flying surface-to-air missiles man are fast and like I said some of them five times faster than I can going downhill with a tailwind so these things probably would have hit them by now but if you can look out over your shoulder and see this missile kind of hanging out and just barely closing it's a little cartoonish at this point but you know it's it's it's Hollywood he's probably either trying to be supersonic or subsonic we have a saying in fighter aviation that speed is life you can always get rid of airspeed you can always pull GE or pull the throttles back so the mask the main reason you're wearing a mask obviously clearly is oxygen if it's needed at higher altitudes but also for communication so your microphone is in fact in the mask and the mask is held onto your face obviously by the helmet the helmets not for like crash protection it's not super durable it's just a helmet that has ear cups and then your mask has the microphone in it and your breathing percent oxygen at that point so let's go back a little bit I want to take a look at this when you're talking about the movie Top Gun there was a couple times in the movie for example when maverick touched down on the flight deck pulled back on the stick and pulled back on the throttles to get airborne last time I checked flying the f-18 when you pull back on the throttles the power goes back so he would have fallen off the the aircraft flight deck so in this scene right here he's dropping his drop tanks to blow them up to maybe decoy these enemy heat-seeking missiles watch what he also does he actually pulls back two throttles and you can see the afterburners go out so now big fireball and the heat-seeking missiles are going to go after that instead of his aircraft so clearly these weren't radar seeking missiles right they were heat-seeking missiles if they got decoy by that heat it's not possible to outrun it it could be possible to outmaneuver it or to decoy it with the chaff the flares or the jammers you're not gonna have her on a missile most missiles are faster than they fastest aircraft on this planet there are technology out there where it says hey I'm seeing a bunch of stuff flying out of this airplane that's hot maybe I should ignore those and stick with the aircraft I haven't flown in a long time so that technology is probably way past at wherever I was lying so one of the missiles got decoyed by the fireball there's a finite amount of rocket fuel in this thing and it's been flying for a good calendar year right now somebody's gonna gonna have a really bad day here because the second one did [Music] so as a fighter pilot you have to be in top shape top physical shape especially your legs and your stomach because as you pull positive genes the blood is rushing out of your heads it's called the hitch maneuver so you want to squeeze your legs and your abs to squeeze the blood to keep it in your head what's the first thing that goes when you pass out your vision we would fight the jet on the edge of consciousness I pull a lot of G's and I'd fight the jet on the edge of what we call grey out I can still fly I'm still talking over the radio maneuvering my hands but I'm actually losing sight of the guy so as I kind of gray out I'll unload a little bit let some blood get back into my vision oh there he is and pull even more that's how much you want to win and you're also wearing what we call a G suit they look like very very tight jeans so to speak go over your flight suit and they're actually plugged into the aircraft and they use engine bleed air so the more G I pull these jeans inflate and they squeeze your legs even more so you can see in this air to air engagement it's very very physically demanding also during this as you're seeing these guys maneuver the adrenaline rush is through the roof they got the next couple seconds of their lives literally to defeat this thing so you're really not even feeling the physiological effects of the G's at this point it's just doing it so behind enemy lines compared to Top Gun definitely a lot more realistic and a little bit more of the discipline and also the search-and-rescue it shows the more Navy Marine Corps team hey folks thanks for watching these clips with me stand by for part two and be safe out there you

Channel: GQ

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Keywords: fighter pilot, fighter pilots, fighter pilot movie, fighter pilot movies, fighter plane, fighter planes, combat, combat scenes, the breakdown, breakdown, whiz buckley, matthew buckley, air force movie, air force movies, air force scene, fighter plan scene, top gun, top gun breakdown, pearl harbor movie, pearl harbor breakdown, behind enemy lines, behind enemy lines break down, fighter jet movie, dogfight, dogfight scene, air force battle, air battle, gq, gq magazine

Id: AR7U1EfUGtI

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020