Top Gun: The Navy's Fighter Weapons School

This small, thin book was the book I couldn't stop coming back to in the late 1980's along with Heatley's "The Cutting Edge". George Hall, a civilian photog, gets an inside look at the men and machines of the Navy's Fighter Weapons School. With the notoriety bred of the movie (which had just been released), Hall was likely one of many looking to get an inside look. Unlike Heatley, Hall is not a fighter pilot (or any kind). However, "Top Gun" manages to imbue his pictures and words with a sense of what it feels like to ride a rollercoaster, and presumably what it's like to fly in a high performance airplane. Rather than a book with some nice pictures and a few spare words, Hall locks on to what an incredibly challenging yet irresistible job being a fighter driver must be. While software makers had begun publishing the first generation of flight simulator games, convincing everybody with an AppleII, Macintosh or "IBM compatible" computer that they too can be a "Top Gun", Hall's perspective reminds us that those who fly fighter aircraft are dedicated professionals who worked hard to achieve their positions and remain tireless in their efforts to keep themselves and their fellow drivers on top. In short order, Hall covers the history of air combat - from the days of the "Red Baron" until modern times (okay - 1987). In between, we have German pilots inventing Blitzkrieg, the heroism of the RAF in the battle of Britain, early bouts of transonic warfare in the Korean skies and the heartbreaking disappointment of the first generation BVR (beyond visual range) missiles of the Vietnam era. Hall's no pilot - a point that he never lets us forget. However, Hall exploits what others would be a weakness, giving his story a rare objectivity. (Similar work would be stunted by empty adulation that praises fighter pilots without detailing the challenges they face). Hall also manages to find bits of irony in the history of air combat: Oswald Boelke crafts a set of basic rules of air combat, then dies in a mid-air collision having apparently forgotten the last rule; Allied pilots faced severe disadvantages in Korea in terms of geography, enemy numbers, politics and hardware - yet scored incredible kill ratios over enemy MiGs; though equipped with mach-2 fighters, the Argentines lose the air war over the Falklands - due to inadequate range and a lack of tanker support - to RAF pilots who have crossed thousands of Atlantic miles; though equipped with a state-of-the-art fire-control system, drivers of supersonic F-4 Phantoms find themselves matched by MiG-17 pilots (the MiG-17 was a barely transonic descendent of a fighter Kurt Tank designed for the Luftwaffe at the end of WWII); the star of "Top Gun", the F-14, is not only easy to spot in a dogfight, but equipped with an underpowered and unreliable engine - not considered a dogfighter, it was probably one of the last aircraft of its time contemplated for Top Gun.Hall fills the book with the lore of FWS an

Civilian photographer George Hall takes you on a guided tour of USN Fighter Weapons School (AKA "Top Gun"), the Navy's post-grad school for fighter pilots. In Top Gun, the top pilots from fighter squadrons thruought the fleet come, not to compete against each other as depicted in the movie, but to learn from each other and to bring their new found expertise back to their units. Rather than flying against each other (they do plenty of that while at sea) they spar against "agressor units" trained adversary pilots steeped in pseudo-communist bombast and flying old but mrderously agile and hard-to-spot jets like the A-4 Skywhak and the F-5 Tiger II. (The F-16N, though slated to equip agressor units hadn't begun to enter service by the time the book was published.) Victory against these agressors, despite the age of their aircraft, is impossible - at the outset. But Top Gun is also about education, and the agressors work their charges well, until the tide of battle begins to turn, and the students begin besting their teachers. More than just a picture book about Top Gun, Hall tells the story of air combat in general - tracing its roots in the flimsy planes and low-tech tactics of WWI to the failure of our all-missile interceptors in the Vietnam war, and the return of modern fighter pilots to the simple section and dogfight tactics of WWII. Hall's pictures compliment the story - when telling of the F-14's disadvantes in terms of its mammoth size, he cuts to a shot of the plane flanked by much smaller Skyhawks, showing how the F-14's tailplane is wider than the Skyhawk's entire wingspan. Describing the simplicity of the F-5 Tiger, the author shows a picture of its control panel, an austere set-up which looks barely sophisticated enough to fly a twin-engine Beech, let alone a mach-2 fighter. When mentioning just how old the agressors' planes are (the Skyhawk was already old when flying missions in Vietnam) he shows one of the venerable jets surrounded by its support team and looking less like an operational jet than an entrant at a Warbirds show. Though not military trained - and making no bones about it - Hall goes a long way to putting the reader into the pilot's seat (actually the observer's seat, in Hall's case, but the g-forces are at least as powerful there). The digital sophistication of the F-18 is ably contrasted with the brutish resistance of such earlier jets as the Phantom. He also consistently underscores Top Gun's philosophy - never get caught with your guard down. (In the low-level exercises, F-14 drivers can expect to meet such threats as helicopter gunships and close-support planes like the A-10, machines with no chance against a mach-2 fighter, unless able to trick its pilot into fighting according to their rules). Through it all, he tosses out some great stories of air combat. I bought this book back in 1987, when the movie and its hype was till fresh, and read it cover-to-cover countless times. Today, the navy has chang