The movie handled that by having the pilot that reported Maverick’s flat spin then tacking on the line “He’s heading out to sea”. I suspect that dialog was added WAY after in post when the filmmakers realized that while the audience may not notice the planes are well under 10K altitude nor understand the hard deck reference, they’re not clueless enough to miss the fact we’re in a frickin desert.
I like to imagine how that would play out in real life. I picture some folks around the San Diego metropolitan area looking up and seeing an F-14 passing overhead frisbee-style and remarking “Well, if he’s shooting for Coronado he’s doing it all wrong”.
There’s a decent bit of decent IRL sense wrapped up in a hefty snowball of dramatic license BS.
IRL, running an afterburner on any jet engine greatly reduces the compressor stall margin. Essentially the main engine output is now exhausting into the high pressure face of the raging afterburner fire that’s pushing back - trying to stuff the main engine exhaust backward into the engine. That’s unhelpful for engine stability.
IRL, ingesting the very strong wake up close behind another fighter pulling Gs can trigger compressor stalls. Likewise getting up close and personal with the burner plume of somebody you’re pursuing too closely.
IRL, an F-14 which has one engine fail at high AOA/G or has one burner blow out at high AOA/G would often depart controlled flight; the large instant thrust asymmetry and reduced yaw stability at high AOA, coupled with the very wide-spaced engines of the F-14 meant the thing would depart much more easily than other contemporary fighters. It occurred in an instant; even a Maverick couldn’t get enough opposite rudder and thrust reduction input in time to prevent the departure.
So I think Hollywood took those legit concerns, and built a mostly-plausible scenario where they’d lose control. Having the second engine fail was sorta fan service to make it instantly obvious to laypeople that jumping out was the only alternative.
I’m not recalling all the detailed specifics of how the ejection went awry, but I recall the outline.
As a general matter IRL jumping out of a flailing airplane is harder; the centripetal forces or Gs make it hard to get into correct body position, stay in correct body position, and reach for and activate the seat firing handles of whatever sort. IRL in straight flight at a moderate speed, once the canopy departs, it’s un-aerodynamic enough it’ll be swept behind the airplane out of the way of the seat(s) path(s) all but instantly.
IRL in an airplane with little forward speed that’s falling more or less like a flat plate, the canopy is a lot more likely (still not a lot, but more) to still be somewhere above the cockpit area even seconds after it’s departed the airplane. They’re both falling more or less in tandem.
I think the writers wanted something that would kill Goose quickly and humanely, and was something they could make visually obvious. Him getting a broken neck or back because he was out of proper body position when Maverick fired the seats then dying in the desert 4 hours later would suck. And be hard to film and make obvious and not take too much screen time. The seat with him in it, or him separately, crashing violently into the canopy just looks fatal to a layman. And is fast for advancing the plot
So again some plausible IRL problems strung together into a not-very-plausible but also not impossible worst case event for both the airplane and poor Goose.
And of course precipitated by Maverick being a reckless showoff, but once in extremis Maverick became the cool magician under pressure who did everything right when it really mattered. And got them both safely out of the airplane. Then Fate stole the save by killing Goose against the randomly fluttering canopy nearby. Mav is such a hero! Barf.
AOA/G is angle of attack, right? But then what’s the G?
Date night! After watching Top Gun (1986) the other day in its limited theater run, da wife and I watched Top Gun: Maverick last night, thanks to YouTube.
I thought it was released last year, but I looked it up and, surprise!, it was released 4 years ago, in 2022.
The connection being that G is the objective function the pilot is controlling to achieve their maneuver goals. AOA is whatever it needs to be to achieve that. Within aircraft limits of course. The nature of high G, and especially lower speed high G, is that it necessarily comes with high AOA.
The engines don’t much care about G as such. But boy do they care about excessive AOA and about ingesting excessive turbulence, and the slower you are the greater the sensitivity gets.