Fighter Pilot Reviews Air Combat Scenes, from 'Independence Day' to 'The Incredibles' | Vanity Fair

now another thing that Hollywood does and I don't blame them for this one is they take some liberties with what it's like to start an aircraft in reality there would be ten minutes of boring film where the pilot is speaking with the crew chief now I want you to check your flaps now I want you to check your rudders now I want you to check whatever it is and there's this warm-up that you have to do you have to check that everything is going to work you don't just take it and go kick the tires light the fires right hello my name is Vincent Aiello I am a retired United States Navy fighter pilot and former instructor at the Navy fighter weapons school better known as Top Gun over the course of my 25-year career I spent more than three years on aircraft carriers over five deployments flying primarily the f-18 Hornet and Super Hornet and today we are going to explore air combat scenes in popular movies this is the Incredibles I remember it being a really fun family movie you've got entertainment for both the kids and the parents but this scene just it proliferates the stereotypes about surface-to-air missiles these things are traveling at Mach 3 and they have pretty much one chance to down whatever aircraft are launched at what they don't do is chase it around like a rabid dog going after an intruder here you have Elastigirl who sees these missiles coming at her and by the time she sits down and puts on her headset it would impact the aircraft and I love the very first thing she does it eliminates the fasten seatbelt sign anyway so she puts out some chaff which is always a good idea aircraft are equipped with chaff and like we saw in Iron Man flares and those are to defeat respectively both radar guided and infrared guided missiles and is usually best to do that with a maneuver of some sort just putting them out in this situation might work and she does a little maneuver there but those missiles that were coming head-on or suddenly behind her and chasing her down aileron rolls oh my goodness aileron rolls do not help to simply defeat it but this scene breaks out of the clouds and lo and behold there's a bunch of ocean in front of her she scoops it out the last second which is a great decoy by the way for the missile anytime you can get close to the ground without hitting it anything that's attacking you is going to have a harder time and so we saw the first missile detonate in the chaff cloud again it looked like which probably not real likely and the next one impacts the water and that's great unfortunately so does the aircraft and yet we'll just jam the throttles forward and keep going now aircraft designed to land on water can do this although you still need to land very gently a jet like this I don't think so but the adviser on this scene did a wonderful job of providing Holly Hunter and the scriptwriters of course the right terminology to use disengage friendlies I assume she thinks that someone who doesn't mean to be employing against her is in fact hey so don't engage us we are friendlies in a little while you're here buddy spike which is a term for hey someone is putting in their radar on someone else and if you know it's a friendly that means it's a buddy spike hey break your lock don't don't keep illuminating me with your radar so you're not as likely to shoot me down what I love about it is she gets all these terms right what I don't love about it is yes at Top Gun we trained always using the correct terminology and when we come back from a training mission we will sit and painfully debrief what we said and what we could have said but in real life when someone shooting at you you're probably not gonna perfectly say it like she does here because people are really shooting at you you're gonna be scared out of your wits and so I thought she was actually too perfect which is kind of funny list of your position so now here you have the missiles that are flying alongside almost in formation here you go and I realize we need the climax of this particular scene we need the daughter to get upset that she can't do it and mom to get a little more panicky and she'll save the day but I'm pretty sure the missiles don't fly in formation and then slowly close in to attack you as we have depicted here and then you again have this massive detonation now maybe we'll give them the benefit of the doubt that the missile set off the fuel remaining in the aircraft but it's generally not this nuclear looking explosion with just this massive fireball and little bits and pieces everywhere that might be a little over dramatic eyes and then we have everybody falling but we have superhuman powers here so mom can turn herself into a parachute that you might see in an ejection scenario and what I love about it is they got it right it's a round parachute and they will gently fall down to the ground as will all the wreckage but here we have some humans that are falling then they are being by the parachute and they fall gently but what happens they land in the water and this massive Hulk of aircraft that's remaining comes swinging down a bit all right well maybe the fuselage ended up with some sort of upward vector at the explosion and it took a little longer but even with the parachute I'm not so sure get a grip or so help me I will ground you for a month well apart from yelling at your family if they're there with you the first thing aircrew want to do when they land in the water is get out of the water so in tactical fighter aircraft we have a raft as part of the ejection seat survival equipment and it will deploy on your way down before you hit the water and it will be tethered to you with a lanyard and you will want to board that raft not only for and exposure of cold water but also to get yourself frankly out of the food chain then you want to assess your situation are you injured do you have any immediate first aid requirements that you need to administer stop the bleeding reset a sprain do something along those lines and the next thing you want to do is to establish communication so if you were in a situation where there are two aircraft and one goes down well the f-22 that remained airborne the whiplash - I believe it was he would want to assume the on-scene commander role and say hey everybody my wingman is down I can see him in the water I'm going to stay here as long as I can fuel permitting until either a rescue helicopter approaches or a ship or some other relief happens so that we can retrieve that person and you want to take stock of what you have available all you'll have is whatever you brought with you so we do have survival vests equipped with different tools and different things that might be useful to you as well as signaling devices like mirrors smoke pencil flares you might have a shroud knife to cut the parachute shrouds so that they're not tangling you up you might have a little extra water you might have whatever you've carried in your G suit and then again the harness that you've strapped into the ejection seat with it will have something in the seat pan maybe a little extra water maybe even some food and so you want to take stock of all that depending on your situation in this case they're out in the open ocean so they want to make sure they are ready for an extended survival situation alright 20th Century Fox brought us True Lies Top Gun was good for the Navy Iron Eagle ISM not quite as good for the Air Force and the Marine Corps of course has the Great Santini and now thankfully True Lies so our character here Arnold Schwarzenegger he does it all including flying the venerable av-8b Harrier and in fact he needs it to go rescue his daughter who's been captured by these evil terrorists and held in a skyscraper in Miami under construction so the av-8b Harrier depicted here is an aircraft found in the United States Marine Corps only and it's based on the Sea Harrier design that was originally in service in the United Kingdom and it actually has a very long and storied service life from the 80s on and is still in service with the United States Marine Corps today and even though it's been seven years he can pick right back up and fly this thing with no trouble so you've got the henchman here that are gonna fire at him a couple things number one with the canopy blown to bits like this and the engine at significant power or sufficient power to hover isn't that big fan right behind you going to be pretty loud is probably going to suck everything down it including all those broken shards of glass maybe even the pilot if you're not strapped in well when you are flying a Harrier in hover mode it's a lot like taking a bowling ball and balancing it on a BB so you're sitting there holding the bow the bowling ball and you're trying to keep it exactly right the last thing you're gonna do is let go those controls because wherever you ended up last is where that aircraft is going to fall off if you're not constantly putting more inputs in so we have some liberties taken here but it's a great scene I think that Harrier seen here treated the Marine Corps well we have fully loaded Harrier here we've got rocket pods 2.75 inch we've got the aim-9 sidewinder and we have gun pots and this is really a configuration for the Harrier it's the GAO 12 25 millimeter cannon unlike the f-22 we saw in iron eagle this one is going to fire about 3,600 rounds a minute so about sixty rounds a second and the gun will be on the left the rounds will be on the right now curiously because the flame out of this gal 12 cannon is so long and it could get sucked back up into the intake you actually have as a Harrier pilot a 150 not minimum speed to fire that and here he is firing at basically zero but again we're not gonna worry about that this aircraft is obviously significantly damaged already I do love though that the short firing and I don't know how they film that scene with a water flaring up in the background but I thought that was pretty cool and then it hits the side of the building and again you've got the independent sound of bullets coming out like that rat-a-tat-tat machine gun I think it's gonna be a bit more even though it's not a hundred rounds a second I think it's gonna be more of a Z's kind of continual sound for 60 rounds a second that's still a lot of rounds alright so his poor distressed daughter who only today also found out that her dad is this super-secret Omega spy is now hanging from this crane and she's going to jump onto the nose of this Harrier while he's flying it I don't know maybe it's a hundred-pound center of gravity change suddenly up at the front I think we're gonna have to wave the flag on that one as well as this one he's got the balance with this aircraft to do it I don't know I don't know why maybe Arnold didn't just land on top of the building and let her down but of course this is a bit more dramatic yeah so as he's out of the cockpit there he's definitely not used in his legs he's not using his left hand it looks like maybe Arnold's using his right to fly the aircraft but that might be a little bit of a stretch as if the rest of this was fully up and I feel for this poor January's working so hard to get this office nice and clean he's got his music he's he's backing me he's making it look good and these careless heroes and villains are just out there wrestling around and next thing you know busting up the joint I mean come on that looks painful I think the aircraft could keep flying glass and structure of a building that's fairly strong but maybe not as strong as a Harry you know in the tail you do have different little exhaust ports that keep it with the right yaw as well as at the wingtips at everyone else it's what keeps the aircraft in balance when it's hovering so if those weren't damaged yeah maybe it could keep hovering here Hey better lucky than good lo and behold two ak-47s right there later so I've seen the launchers that we use for our aim-9 sidewinders and they're not all that strong now the missile itself weighs about 200 pounds let's assume this gentleman in his combat boots and vest and weapon weigh about 200 pounds plus he's falling so he's got a little bit Nursia and momentum I'm pretty sure he's gonna rip that weapon right off that launcher and even if he doesn't I'm thinking as soon as this weapon fires I don't know that it's going to travel quite that well it does have a strong rocket but your fire that's just a little glorious and there's that huge fireball again you can't go without those I don't know I'm gonna waive the brown flag on that whole sequence I'm sorry great movie Marines you served well and we're represented well but I'm not so sure all right 1986 not only brought us Top Gun but also earlier in that year brought us Iron Eagle this movie hasn't really aged too well and when I was young I loved it because it had flying scenes and those were hard to get we didn't have the internet back then but now it's kind of painful the watts so in the very first scene here that we're gonna look at today we have our hero Doug taking chappie who he's got to convince out for a ride in this f-16 beam and the first thing we notice is the seat belts out of my 1965 Chevy Impala are what is holding Doug here - whoo the ejection seat it's awful come on folks where we're at on that one tries to help us out this fitting has to be able to do two things at least for us in the Navy the second thing but for everyone it has to be strong enough to attach you and your 200 pounds roughly with everything you're wearing and that ejection seat it straps you as we said earlier into the head box where the parachute is so if you have to eject and when that seat man separation occurs those two points are all that is holding you to that parachute and I don't think a 60s around muscle car seat is gonna hack it but the second thing it does at least for Navy fliers and I assume the Air Force aircraft have the same thing is they actually have saltwater detection capability built into them so if you eject and are knocked unconscious let's think of goose in Top Gun well when you hit the water BAM those are gonna pop and you are going to be hopefully free of that parachute which if it collects enough water could drag you down and drown you all right they'll make their way over to the runway and they'll take off and another thing that I felt kind of slipped through the editing cracks here a little bit is we have this footage of f-16s flying sometimes the wings are clean meaning nothing on them sometimes they are loaded with weapons and I just felt like they should have been a little more consistent but that's okay all right so of course the first thing that Doug has to do is convince chappy Sinclair that he is in fact a fighter pilot even a hot dog fighter pilot I guess if you do some aileron rolls you can tell I hate aileron rolls I never knew I did before today but that makes you a hot dog and then if you fly vertically I guess you're an astronaut generally we would have a dark visor on as well as the mast the mask is supposed to be on from startup to shutdown now admittedly I've flown on my mask off plenty but in this case Hollywood needs us to see the anguish the exhilaration the different facial expressions so that we can be more in tune with our actors here we have an f-16 the wings are clean in this case and in the very next scene we've got bombs I mean come on you could have at least spaced it out a little bit but yeah we'll forgive them it was fine scenes and in the 80s that was hard to find yes sir colonel sir now the fa-18 that i flew for most of my career as your name implies is both fighter and attack and i have attacked a lot of ranges in my day or target complexes whatever you want to call them but I have never seen targets quite like what they have depicted here great big blue squares with red X's I imagine that that is necessary for something visually significant for the audience just never seen anything quite like just got to feel your way I want you to concentrate now this might have been something one of my instructors said to me in flight school these days aircraft don't tell anyone because they probably pay us too much as easy as it is but it's almost foolproof it will correct if you're at the wrong speed it will correct for you if you're at the wrong altitude or dive angle now you might dud the bomb if you're too low or it might not hit with the right parameters at impact but it is pretty easy now to attack targets certainly with an f-18 I never did it the f-16 that was only air-to-air but from what I understand it's not that complex Wow chappy is yelling at poor Doug here for his music taste and I don't blame him nowadays especially what you see in the background in what I presume is a studio setting with a green-screen now earlier it looked normal but here looks like there's almost individual rocks or sagebrush they would be at like 10 feet for it to look like that and that is not normal now the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels they can get down and do certain things at that low altitude for the rest of us that just looked a little too close and I wish they would have done a slightly better job making it look like these guys were higher you have a switch to arm up here weapons and it's either in the safe switch or the arm switch it's foolproof you don't have to worry about in a display that could fail but I really love this display when it comes back later because it's gonna show us some feedback that's a little bit enlightening shall I say but it's believable so you have a winged form like a top-down view of the f-16 you have the fuel up here 5703 that's pounds that's that's about right 346 rounds for the 20 millimeter cannon and then I don't know what W is SW could be Sidewinder ma could be maverick and a so not quite sure but here we have some rockets that are firing and of course they missed this time I want you to drop one of those Bob gated tools now a mark 82 is a 500-pound class warhead that is like a projectile of a bullet if you think about it's got the pointy front end and the flat back end but what you do is you can accessorize it you can put a guidance kit on the front maybe laser or GPS guided you can put different fins on the back you can have maybe a fin that opens to the bomb or you can have conical fins that just help it fall and it will spin and fall but what you don't have is forward-firing mark eighty twos and I don't know what they were hoping here for but all of a sudden holy cow we just lost 3,000 pounds of fuel and that went quickly so we might have a fuel leak and hey look we have more bullets save go cuddle you can't go in there what you shooting like that no you're right we can't go in there with you shooting like this but chappie you know what solves everything 80s rock now what also is interesting here is those 80s video games we all used to play you remember what happened when you expended all your orbits you push a button you know if the land you don't have to quit you don't have to go get a sandwich out of the kitchen you just push the button and you keep playing for hours well hey look at this a whole new plan form full of weapons and I like weapons aren't yep you bet you weapons firing sure now I like that they got the stick correct here I mean this is the hat that helps you trim the aircraft and this is the pickle switch it's used for air ground ordnance I thought they got that part right all right so this is where I have just a little bone to pick first off we have these massive explosions like this enormous mark 77 napalm fuel air explosion folks get on one of the different video services online and look up a 500-pound mark 80 series weapon it's a little bit of fire it's a lot of black and it's not very exciting and of course that's why Tristar gives us this because this is far more compelling target destroyed this is the one I love like you have some awesome sensor that's out there sampling the environment it can tell that these big blue squares with the red X's are somehow destroyed with your weapons and that alone is reason to celebrate oh I love it but hey it's exciting it's a good movie and it's got great flying footage the f-16 can pull up to nine G's so if you weigh 200 pounds normally that is like a force of 1,800 pounds pushing down on your body which is why many fighter pilots myself included have stiff necks as they get older because you're also wearing that helmet on your 8 pound head and you have to look around in a dogfight and that can get very painful and difficult pulling G's flying a fighter is like a full-contact sport it's very important to be in good physical conditioning and shape and it you can come back from a flight and be sweaty you are maneuvering you're pulling down you're bearing against that g-force because what you're trying to do is you're trying to keep the blood up in your head where you need it not down on your feet where it's doing you no good because your noggin if it's out of blood guess what it's not going to work and that is your vision that is your decision-making that is your very consciousness and so it can be very difficult to perform these maneuvers and stay with it now your body builds a tolerance just like it does for most other things if you were a young person you used to not like rollercoasters you ride enough for them you find your body gets used to spending in twirling and it's the same thing in fighter jets but it is a lot of effort to keep that blood where it needs to be and that is up in the top of your bottle 20th Century Fox's Independence Day came out at a pivotal time for me it was in the mid 90s I just received my navy wings of gold and started flying the f-18 and it was just so much fun to see the airplane that I was going to fly it climax where the aliens are attacking area 51 sees this hodgepodge of old washed-up pilots that are available because we have plenty of aircraft but not enough pilots and I don't know that I've ever seen anything quite like that but hey let's make it work out because we've got the character here who needs to redeem himself and so one of the first scenes you see here is what we would call a DDI it's a display in the cockpit we have two one on each side and ours are normally green hewed or white hewed frankly it's actually otherwise pretty close in fact all of these indications right here are all cautions we could theoretically have in an f-18 your left aim at pressure your canopies unlock that's bad we're gonna want that fixed hydraulic system one a the battery switch is not on that's bad anyway so against some of it right they get some of it not quite as bright but that's okay so the president who's out there flying former Gulf War fighter pilot alright he's gonna escort the last chance and what do they do they take their 578 rounds of twenty millimeter that we have in an f-18 Legacy Hornet and they're just gonna hose it out there in space at 100 rounds of second so you get what less than six seconds but we'll just shoot it out there in front of you to pave the way and lo and behold who knows maybe we'll hit an alien spaceship plus when the firing is happening it sounds like an alien gun it sounds like a laser gun I love it like that tone I've got tone Eagle 20 Eagle 20 box litter box tune now one thing the instructors got right in El Toro was a lot of the terminology that's used in this movie and other clips you hear Will Smith's character saying blow through blow through you hear all these different terminology calls that we really do use and in this case with that 1,500 Hertz tone then you have him call his callsign Eagle 20 fox 2 fox 2 is the comraderie term for I am launching an IR guided weapon Fox 3 would be a ton on this weapon and a fox 1 would be like a radar guided weapon like a sparrow so I thought they did that well I've got the stick right here the only bummer is they used the wrong button now in enough 16 only the trigger fires the gun but in an f-18 the trigger fires both the guns and the missiles and the pickle button up here is for anything air-to-surface and this enormous weapon looks like a harpoon I'm not quite sure you've got these sparks showing like oh dear something's wrong and then this display I've never seen before showing a malfunction scrub it now I guess it's an arm for not an m9 okay I stand corrected anyway of course you've got the obligatory family picture just like cougar showed us in Top Gun but now because we have this malfunction and it was our last hope and they're going to destroy that family on the ground Russell knows what he needs to do this last scene is heroic and don't get me wrong I don't want to take anything from Russell he redeems himself my problem is with physics so when an f-18 flies vertically it slows down immediately and instantly and the ability to sustain vertical flight at least in an f-18 is not going to last very long because you have all of gravity pulling directly behind and pulling on you and you're going to run out of speed that the gravity and the weight of aircraft is not going to be matched by the thrust coming out of the engines particularly at higher altitudes but even so generally speaking in the f-18 what happens is you pull they come to a stop and then you fall out of the sky what you don't do is slowly and gently dock with this alien space station as you're making your way in this vertical maneuver no you're going to pull your nose up you are going to run out of airspeed and you're gonna fall off almost immediately so they have to draw it out this is his Varela cam oment and apparently if you simply put your thumb in the dike then you have thwarted alien attack of course we've got our other heroes that have taken down their super effective screen to allow that type of strength but what I wish they would have talked about before is okay Russell just martyred himself for the sake of area 51 hey tell everybody now we know how to bring them down what about all the other fighter pilots that gave themselves out there I mean there should be statues to these folks and all over the world now but no they don't even get it even a bare mention terrible I thought Dunkirk was a beautifully made movie and what I really enjoyed about it is you have three storylines and they eventually overlap and interweave and one of them is a military aviator and his wingman so what's not to love about that now in the climactic scene for The Aviator we have him with his aircraft damaged from a previous attack and he's not sure how much fuel he has and he is flying over the beach where the troops are being evacuated and his fuel exhausts and of course they'll use a little sound like you would expect something when it's dying with a piston motor so what we see here though is he's flying along with his flaps partly extended already flying up the beach at what looks like maybe 500 feet so he's probably doing let's give him the benefit of the doubt 150 knots well once you lose your thrust provided by the engine one of two things is going to happen right away maybe both things one is you're either going to slow down the other is you're going to go down but in the world of Dunkirk apparently neither of these is true and you can glide your unpowered Spitfire for as long as it takes including all the way up the beach you can turn 180 degrees vanquish an enemy about to attack your peers and then fly all the way down the beach until the Sun sets and finally land and that was my one big heartache with this movie as an aviator is when your engine quits guess what you're going down right away and you're thinking about ditching all right so our hero went gliding off from right to left look like at that point it was maybe 300 feet off the ground and now we've got this Stuka dive-bomber attacking the British folks waiting to go to safety our resigned commander takes his fate like stoically close in his eyes but lo and behold the fighter pilot saves the day of course he does he's now down to 150 feet he still has all of his knots and the nice thing about his engine being off is that he can hear the accolades and adulation coming from the thousands and thousands of troops on the beach why didn't he ditch his airplane right next to them and get in line for a ride home instead he spends all this time cranking down his landing here so that he can land on the beach and stay dry only to then destroy his own airplane and get captured well you're gonna be much safer ditching and you're gonna be much safer ditching with all these ships and all these troops so I kind of thought they missed the mark on that one too but maybe they wanted the hero to get some sort of penance I don't know for staying out too long or losing his wingman but I just felt like they should have had him do what I would have done if it was my tail on the line and that is circle around where I feel like I could probably be plucked out of the water pretty easily and ditched next to my friendly ships trying to rescue us so I certainly want to thank Vanity Fair for the opportunity to come and talk about a subject I'm so passionate about I really truly enjoyed my 25 years in service flying fighter jets was just the icing on the cake and I get it we've beat up some movies today they have to be entertaining real-life air combat is probably not quite as glamorous as Hollywood wants it to be and if they made it like real life people wouldn't show up so I really had a good time talking about these movies today and I hope you enjoyed watching

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Rating: 4.9135561 out of 5

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Id: yDeR9eQE4oI

Length: 32min 9sec (1929 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020