In the movie Top Gun, Maverick has some flying trick where he “hits the breaks, he’ll fly right by”. It happens twice in the film. Here’s the second instance:
In a trailer for the new movie, Top Gun: Maverick, he apparently does it again:
Is this a real thing a pilot could do with an aircraft? How would it work? They seem to show the pilot pulling up on the stick and forward on another lever (throttle? wing surface or something?). The whole aircraft goes briefly vertical (which would obviously slow things down) then recovers (how?). Would this even be an effective dogfighting move?
Not sure if this should have been in FQ, but it’s about a movie so here we are.
In aircraft, altitude is pretty much controlled with the throttle and speed is pretty much controlled with pitch. You can pull up and climb, or push down and dive, but the speed will degrease or increase, respectively. That’s a broad statement that includes exceptions, but I’m not going to post a treatise on aerodynamics – especially when there are people here who can explain it better than I.
In a nutshell, reducing the throttle will attenuate a climb when you pull back on the stick; while increasing pitch increases drag and causes the aircraft to slow down. Fighter aircraft (and other aircraft) also have ‘speed brakes’; panels that can be extended to increase drag and reduce speed. (Most General Aviation aircraft just use flaps.)
When initiating the maneuver, Maverick slams the throttle forward in that clip. I don’t think they made much effort to get any details right in that movie.
I would think just from basic physics that the maneuver would involve initially decreasing thrust while pulling back hard on the stick, then quickly adding back thrust as the aircraft stalls. I’m not an expert in these aircraft, but I’m certain it would not involve adding full power at the beginning - that would just make the aircraft climb straight up.
Under “execution” it seems to be describing: (1) disengage the angle of attack limiter (2) reduce thrust and pull back hard on the stick (3) re-center the stick (4) when the nose starts to go down, pull the stick back gently as the nose comes back down to level and re-apply thrust to compensate for the reduced lift
Nah, all Maverick did was pull up and hit the air brakes (back between the tails/engines) and (presumably) lowered his throttle, which both converted some forward velocity into altitude, as well as dropped the speed directly.
This got him out of the way of the pursuing plane (Jester), and slowed him down, which made Jester fly past, at which point Mav pushed his nose down and increased his throttle and was on Jester’s tail.
It wasn’t so dramatic as Pugachev’s Cobra, plus I’m not sure that F-14 Tomcats are capable of that maneuver.
And as soon as I reply to this the real figher pilots (as opposed to video game fighter pilots like myself) will post, but you usually wouldn’t want to do this in combat. You want to keep as much energy as possible (either kinetic (speed) or potential (height), you can trade one back and forth for the other). How much you can maneuver is related to how much energy you have. Once your energy gets too low the only direction you can go is down.
It might work as a surprise to get someone off your tail (presuming they were very close, and in the first Top Gun movie they were pretty much always “parade formation” close. Actually too close for missiles and close enough that guns are dangerous because you might hit the parts falling off). But you better then be able to shoot them down right away, because they are now much faster than you and it will take you a while to get that energy back.
Conceptually, it could work in the perfect circumstances, but I strongly doubt this maneuver would ever be taught or used in real, modern air combat. Much of the tactics of air combat centers around retaining your energy - in the form of airspeed or altitude - and how to maintain your energy advantage throughout the fight. Giving up energy on purpose would run counter to any fighter pilot’s instincts.
The style of fight - like ww2 planes turning tight around each other to get behind each other from 200 yards away - is something that isn’t expected to happen much in modern combat. The planes are so fast and powerful, and the weapon systems are so sophisticated with a large launch window in all sorts of circumstances. It’s certainly possible that an actual gun fight could still exist somewhere, and maybe you’d train for it in top gun type situations. But in actual practice, someone is probably going to be far enough behind you that they would have time to react to your bizarre little maneuver and keep their distance from you, and probably easily blow you out of the sky while you left yourself vulnerable.
So could it work, hypothetically, in unusual circumstances? Probably. If the plane has good airbrakes. Reducing the throttle alone wouldn’t change your speed fast enough to pull something like this off. Would this ever be taught, or used by real pilots in combat situations? Almost certainly not.
They definitely jumped the gun on that one. 1960s era missiles where nowhere near flexible or reliable enough to arm a plane exclusively. That was a bad decision.
And I suspect fighter planes will still be kept armed with a gun for a long time as part of the lesson learned there. Guns also have secondary uses like taking out non-maneuvering targets without using up a limited missile supply (to take out a recon drone, for example), strafing, etc.
But the missiles available in 2021 are dramatically different than those in the 1960s. They can track all-aspect, they can launch high off-bore, the radar ones have internal/independent radar and guidance, etc. They are far more useful in a close in knife fight than the missiles of the 1960s ever were, though it’s a matter of speculation as to how many close range fighter fights could happen even in a peer war given how good the radars and missiles are now to end fights before they get into close range.
It seems to me that the only scenario where two modern enemy fighters would likely come close enough to one another to be in the same shot for Hollywood purposes would be something like the early part of the movie where (if I recall correctly) they are posturing with close maneuvers to try to intimidate, without engaging.
This really bugs me about CGI; not only for modern fighters, but also earlier ones. The S/FX artists cram way too many aircraft in was too small spaces. You know why Tora! Tora! Tora! looked so good? They used real airplanes that maneuvered like real airplanes.
