Thanks. I will look for this and watch it.
More: I’m guessing there won’t be much or anything new, but it’ll recap what is already known and will review the leading plausible theories.
In other words just read the wiki article.
You forgot the subtitle, “A Musical Apology”.
Thanks for that. It’s a funny thing, 12 year old me saw the film seven times in the cinema and countless times on video and always thought the enemy were Russian. I think simply because they were flying “MIGs”. I was well aware of many other inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and inventions, and used to pick the movie apart while simultaneously loving it.
You just have to treat it as occurring in an alternate universe. I do have to correct myself, though; apparently Red Banner Pacific Fleet did perform some operations in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea—mostly mine-clearing and port flagging—but no naval aviation, so the mystery of the combatant nation in Top Gun remains. However, the enemy nation in Top Gun: Maverick is quite obviously…Finland.
Stranger
When I lived in Mexico, I would complain that the Spanish translations of English-language films often did this – e.g., Jaws was called Tiburon! (which simply means Shark!) [/hijack]
Because the opening scene aerial fighting in the original TopGun was done over water, I had always assumed the adversaries were meant to be Libyan or similar. Essentially a replay of the real world Gulf of Sidra incident* which was then 5 years previous. So some random difficult Middle Eastern country equipped w Russian / Soviet equipment. Of which there were several candidates at the time.
Whether the scene of the battle was the Med, the IO, the Arabian Gulf, or wherever was deliberately left vague.
*
You’ve heard of the French Nation? The Chinese Nation? Well, this was the Imaja Nation.
Count me as one that thought the OG Top Gun was fighting Russians.
I hate to hijack the Top Gun thread, but just wanted to say I watched the three part doc on Netflix. It covers all bases but gives way too much time to the theories of an aviation blogger and a French journalist, either of whom could give Giorgio Tsoukalos a run for his money.
They have lots of unobtanium
[Reactivate hijack] Not nearly as bad as the Korean translation for The Sixth Sense …
Spoiler
He’s a Ghost!
For real? Wow.
I feel like if they would just spoil M. Night Shyamalan films up front, viewers would be nearly as let down by the ‘surprise’ ending.
Stranger
on a (vaguely) related tangent:
in about 2015 I bumped into a U. of Sheffield (?) scientist who worked on “autonomous sensors” (i.e. sensors that do not need external AC or DC fed to them) on - amongst other applications - Rolls Royce jet engines.
He said they had developed a sensor that would ping to a satelite every couple of seconds to inform the GPS location of the sensor (using the engine’s vibrations to create the energy needed for the sensor/radio package to work).
And he used the MH370 as an example for his work …had they only spent a couple of 100s of $ more on their airplane-spec, they’d know fairly certain where it is (and possibly an aproximation of what happened)
this conversation stuck with me for 8 years now.
I was looking forward to this “documentary” and was greatly disappointed.
Much of the strong opinions people had about the incident seemed to stem from profound disbelief that a plane can “just disappear” and particularly that no wreckage or physical trace was found (up to the point some was). I drove my wife nuts yelling “The ocean is vast and deep!” at the television repeatedly. LIke “Titanic was lost in 1912 in a fairly well-known area and still wasn’t found until the '80s” vast and deep.
And that’s before we get to the Mustache-Twirlingly Evil Les Americains/Conspiracy of The Anglosphere “theory” which fails for (among various reasons) the same reason as “we didn’t really go to the Moon” fails: the other side – China, in this instance – has absolutely no bloody reason not to yell from the rooftops about what the Americans allegedly did/didn’t do. The Russian theory was plausible by comparison, but only by comparison (it requires a Russian agent to be self-sacrificing just for a diversion).
I just watched it and have to agree with you. The “America has always known what happened to MH370” theory is weak, and it’s ludicrous that two AWACS planes would jam the communications of that B777. Further, to claim that fighters would automatically be scrambled for the overflying civilian jetliner simply because there was a joint US-Thai military exercise underway is just stupid — the “They would’ve scrambled fighter jets to take assess the jetliner, why didn’t they?” position posited by French journalist Florence de Changy is plain idiocy.
ISTM that these explanations were a feeble attempt to identify a new smoking gun that hadn’t been identified before.
Otherwise I found the documentary to be a pretty good overview of the mystery. I just found and downloaded the PDF of the MH370 Safety Investigation Report and will be reading that. It is dated 02 Jul 2014, so it have to be a very preliminary report.
Here is that report:
Weirdly, the finding of wreckage only intensified the conspiracy theories. Why was the ID plate on the flaperon missing? Why was all the other wreckage being found only by that one oddball with connections to Russia? It’s like the JFK assassination; the more evidence discovered, the more people’s perceptions veer from reality.
Those questions, and also how only one person, Blaine Gibson, has been uncannily finding much of the debris so far.
If the implication is that someone deliberately removed the ID plate, then why would they toss the goddam flaperon back in to the ocean afterward?
The ID plates are apparently removed when a plane is scrapped. So one could theorize that the flaperon is from a scrap yard; not the missing plane. I thought they were going to suggest the parts were from the 777 downed over Eastern Ukraine but I guess there are a lot of those parts available from decommissioned planes.