Headscratchers / Top Gun: Maverick

Why were the enemy's planes supposedly so superior to those of America's elite pilots?

• Aren't Top Gun graduates supposed to be the best of the best? How is it then that their planes were supposedly so outclassed by the enemy? Shouldn't "the best pilots on the planet" also have access to the best planes?
  • TOPGUN graduates are US Navy pilots, which means they have access to planes that are carrier-capable like the F/A-18s or the F-35s, not something like the F-15s or F-22s which are non-carrier-capable and thus reserved only for the US Air Force. Earlier in the film when Cyclone asks for Maverick's recommendations on how to attack the rogue nation's uranium facility, Maverick explains that due to the location of the site in the mountains, the F-35's advanced guidance system is affected by the magnetic jamming so it's not an ideal choice. This actually ends up becoming a Chekhov's Skill later when Maverick and Rooster escapes in the F-14 and forces the Su-57 pilot to chase them through the canyons where the magnetic jamming is also interfering with the Su-57's missile guidance system and forces the pilot to use his guns instead. This leaves the less advanced F/A-18 as the sole available option for the TOPGUN pilots. The enemy has no such limitation here: they don't have to take off from a carrier, they don't have to fly below the radar in their own airspace, thus they get to fly the more advanced Su-57 Felons (or as they call it in the movie: "fifth-generation fighters").
  • This is also an example of the plot being written to accommodate real-life complications in the production. For all of their massive support for the Top Gun franchise, the US Navy likely drew the line at providing the F-35 Lightning II, their latest and most advanced fighter aircraft, for the production to extensively use. Not only for the extremely high operating costs of providing F-35s to film, but also for the simple problem that F-35s currently don't have a two-seat version, which would be required to film the actors' cockpits scenes. Then you have to bear in mind that that Top Gun: Maverick had actually finished filming three years ago and was only released this year (2022) due to post-production issues and a global pandemic. The US Navy only declared the F-35 as "initially operational" in 2019, concurrently with the production of the Top Gun sequel. The Navy likely permitted the production only enough access to the F-35 to use in the opening scene.
    • The F-35 certainly also has classified stuff in the cockpit the Navy doesn't want a film crew or actor anywhere near, even on the ground — the US Navy loves the Top Gun movies, sure, but it loves operational security much, much more.
  • 5th Generation fighters like the F-35 and Su-57 are a massive leap in performance and capability over 4th Generation fighters like the F-14 and F-18. Lt. Colonel Dave Berke, the USMC's F-35 guru, likened the transition from the F-18 to the F-35 as going from a flip phone to an iPhone. 5th Generation fighters have superior sensor fusion, superior electronic warfare abilities, radar stealthing, and superior maneuverability. As an example of just how much of an Outside-Context Problem these fighters are, during the F-22's first deployment to Red Flag, a lone f-22 went up against FOUR Red Flag Aggressors, the Air Force's equivalent of Top Gun instructors. The fourth aggressor managed to get a kill on the F-22... after it had already killed the other three aggressors in the dogfight.
  • As to the flipside of your question — "If only the Air Force has the really new stuff, why didn't they ask the Air Force to do it?" — the answer is that they might have had other problems. The letters on the front of airplane designations aren't just for show; they are Meaningful Names. The F-14 was the 14th fighter aircraft operated by the USAF (since the tri-service re-designation in 1962); the F-22 is the 22nd; both of them are designed to shoot down enemy airplanes. They are not designed to bomb ground targets; you have things like the A-10 attack aircraft for that. What did Maverick's team fly? F/A-18 Hornets, Jack of All Stats multi-role aircraft. Does the Air Force have anything equivalent? ...Well, technically, it has the F-35, same as the Navy, but Maverick already gave a Watsonian Hand Wave for why they can't be used. Besides, you can't send the Air Force in a movie that's about, y'know, the Navy.
    • Pedantic nitpick: While Attack jets are designed primarily for ground attack, ground attack has been a common role for fighter planes as far back as World War II. The advent of precision-strike weapons has served to make fighters ever more capable at the attack role, which is helpful as they can more effectively protect themselves from enemy aircraft. In fact, certain strike missions, such as Supression of Enemy Air Defenses, are reserved for specialized fighters, such as the F-4G Wild Weasel, F-16CJ Viper, and as previously mentioned, the F-35. But then if the F-35s were carrying out their SEAD mission in conjunction with the strike, the climactic air battle would have offered fewer opportunities for our heroes to show off.
  • In addition to everything above, Real Life is not so simple. You'd think that the best pilots would always have the best planes, but in reality the Pentagon has its share of stupid manufacturing snafus where (for instance) things get caught up between a dozen different contractors who aren't working as a cohesive unit and everyone's busy blaming each other and playing games with paperwork and the end result is that the next-gen fighters we were promised are now massively behind schedule and over budget. It's not impossible for a more focused adversary to skip all those problems and leapfrog the U.S. in technical know-how (temporarily), despite the U.S.'s vast wealth.
  • We hear early on from Warlock that the Pentagon is the one that tasked the Navy with putting a strike package together. The fact that the Pentagon assigned it to the Navy, and not the Air Force, means that either there are no airbases in range, or flying over land was considered more dangerous, necessitating a carrier strike. Since the F-35 is dismissed outright, that only leaves F/A-18 Super Hornets as the possible strike aircraft.

Isn't Rooster too old to be a mere Lieutenant?

• A major plot hole would be Goose's son's age and rank in this movie. In the original, we see Bradley as a child of maybe 4 or 5 sitting next to his father as he plays "Great Balls of Fire" on the piano. If the movie is set 36 years after, Rooster would be 39 or 40 years old. He’d be either an O-5 Commander in charge of his own fighter squadron or at the least a senior O-4 Lieutenant Commander on his swan song tour before mandatory retirement. He wouldn’t still be a Lieutenant.
  • Maverick was first intended for a 2019 release after being shot in 2018, maybe it's still set in 2019 so 33 years later?
  • Adding to this, the Top Gun sequel was planned to enter production in 2013, until Tony Scott's death put the project on ice. It's unknown how much carried over from that project into Maverick, but if that film also centered around Goose's son he would have been in his early 30s, which is closer to Miles Teller's age.
  • It's also explained that Maverick pulled his papers at the Naval Academy, setting his career back several years.
  • Being denied admission to Annapolis doesn’t derail a guy’s career more than say a couple of years maximum. NROTC scholarships are more easily obtained and failing that, there is Aviation OCS.

How could Maverick have derailed Rooster's application to Annapolis?

• Another plot hole is how Maverick kept Rooster out of the Naval Academy and how it supposedly "set his career back 4 years!" First, while a recommendation from a senior Navy or Marine Corps officer can help get one in, only the Academy's admissions committee can refuse admission. It is doubtful that Maverick with his love for flying would take what is essentially a desk job alongside stodgy academic types for two years, to serve on the academy's admissions committee. Particularly so, since he was also refused admission. There is no way Maverick could have torpedoed Rooster's admission to Annapolis like that. Also, the USNA is just one possible path to an officer's commission in the Navy. Had he been rejected from Annapolis, Rooster could have obtained a NROTC scholarship to get in, or gone to Aviation OCS after graduating university. He would have commissioned at about the same time as his peers in the USNA. He wouldn't have been "held back."
  • It's possible that it isn't really Maverick who exercises his authority to keep Rooster out of the Naval Academy, but rather Iceman's, who did it on Maverick's behalf (and probably for himself as well, since Iceman could probably also feel guilty about his own role in Goose's death and doesn't want Goose's son to end up like his old man). Rooster probably figures it out that it was Maverick who told Iceman to keep him out of the Navy by any means necessary, but since he couldn't do anything to a four-star admiral, he directed his hatred to Maverick instead.
  • For US Navy officers, graduating from Annapolis is also a marker of greater prestige than a "normy" OCS, just as it is for Army officers to graduate from West Point, or for civilians to graduate from an Ivy League university. The fact that Rooster is already a naval aviator means that he eventually became an officer anyway, but not becoming an "Annapolis man" would really sting for a Navy brat such as him.
  • Thing is, unless that officer was a Grade-A screwup right from the beginning, usually, promotions to O-2 and O-3 are almost automatic. The “Annapolis man” preference becomes prevalent only when promotions to O-4 Lieutenant Commander and above are considered. So, that shouldn’t have held back Rooster’s career till this point.

Why didn't the US Navy launch another missile barrage to against the enemy SAM sites that they knew were there?

• Before Dagger Squadron begins their raid on the nuclear facility, the US Navy launches a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroy an enemy airport and as many of their aircraft as possible. Cyclone and Warlock's first briefing to Maverick also shows that the Navy is already familiar with the anti-air defenses of the valley leading up to the nuclear facility. Yet the Navy does nothing to suppress the air defenses in spite having already struck the airport and alerted the enemy to their presence anyways. Why can't the Navy be bothered to launch another missile barrage to strike at the air defenses, and eliminate an extreme threat to their pilots?
  • The SAM sites are situated all over the airspace. As in, pretty much the entire area starting from the entrance to the canyon to the stockpile itself is covered in a very wide range of anti-air network, too much for the cruise missiles to take them all out by the time the strike team begins their attack run. They could take out a few of them, but it wouldn't help that much as the strike team will have to breach the altitude limit at the end of the mission and alert the remaining SAM sites anyway, which means the pilots have no choice but to brave through it. The Navy has to pick between destroying the avoidable SAM sites that are too many to take out effectively or the enemy airbase containing the fifth-gen fighters which are far more dangerous threats. Taking that into account and the choice is clear. Plus, we don't know if some of those SAM sites are out of the Tomahawk range or not.
    • You'd think that maybe that could just send two ships, one with enough missiles to take out the airport and another with additional missiles to take out (some of) the SAM sites. I guess range could be the issue, since the exact layout is a little unclear. Or maybe attacking the SAM sites would just introduce new problems, such as causing landslides that change the geometry of the canyon at the last minute. Assuming that some SAM sites survive the salvo, the pilots would then be forced to navigate a canyon that might be significantly different from what they trained for. So maybe the safest option was to just let the SAM sites stay operational and trust the pilots to fly beneath them.
    • A standard VLS loadout for a Ticonderoga cruiser as of 2018 includes 32 Tomahawks, however the Leyte Gulf only launches 24 of them at the enemy airfield, that still leaves 8 Tomahawks that could have been used against the SAM launchers to either destroy them at best or force them to waste their missiles hitting Tomahawks at worst.
    • Perhaps they were reserving their last 8 missiles for if a target of opportunity appeared? Given the number of SAM launchers seen in the movie trying to use a mere 8 Tomahawks on them might have been considered a waste of resources that might be needed somewhere else.
    • SAM launchers in real-life are usually quite mobile. The ones seen in the movie use fixed launchers, but if I'm not mistaken even those can be packed up and moved within a few hours, which would make targeting them with (expensive) cruise missiles impossible.
    • Cruise missiles hit their targets within minutes, not hours. If the U.S. knows where the SAM launchers are at the moment the missiles are fired, there's no way the SAM launchers will move to new locations before the missiles arrive.
    • Which assumes they knew where the SAM launchers were when they launched the Macross Missile Massacre, which could be tricky given that, as mentioned before, the launchers are mobile. It is also common enough for SAM batteries to keep their radars shut off until they know targets are nearby, to make them more difficult to target.
  • It's also possible that there are civilian villages or other off-limits targets around the SAM sites, so that a mass cruise missile attack on the whole area sufficient to suppress the SAMs would also result in unacceptable civilian losses.

Why was the enemy's base security so poor?

• Maverick and Rooster's heist of an enemy F-14 was only possible because they were literally no enemy guards or personnel on one side of the airfield. The two didn't so much sneak into the F-14's hanger, but more accurately strolled into the base without being noticed by the hundreds of soldiers running around . . . on the other side of the base. The enemy airfield didn't even have fences, checkpoints, or guard towers, and the two Americans simply entered it by running down a mountain slope. Either the airfield was still under construction and the defenses hadn't been fully set up, or the enemy blew most of their budget on their lavish Su-57s and nuclear program instead of training half-competent infantrymen.
  • It's possible that in the confusion surrounding the Tomahawk bombing of the airbase, the enemy soldiers mistook Maverick and Rooster for being their own pilots from the distance and didn't bother checking (also they probably assumed any downed pilot would be taken care of by the Mi-35 they sent out earlier). Also, the airbase was almost completely destroyed by the raid: the runway is out of commission and the planes are gone. There's no reason for the enemy to believe anyone would be crazy enough to get the sole remaining F-14 off the ground, which is probably why no one bothers to guard the hangar (then there's the implication that the F-14 is still under maintenance as well, since we later learned that the ejection seats are broken, which makes it even less likely for anyone to use it). Put simply, the confusion created by the airbase destruction and the improbability of anyone being crazy enough to take an aged and poorly-maintained F-14 off the ground while there's no runway means the enemy has no reason to guard that particular section of the airbase. Maverick and Rooster were simply taking Refuge in Audacity and doing the one thing the enemy would never expect anyone is capable of doing.
  • It also helped that the entire airfield was obscured in a thick cover of smoke. From a distance, Mav and Rooster would have been indistinguishable from the pilots that were actually supposed to be there. That's why Mav said to walk instead of run, all they really had to do to avoid suspicion was just act like they were supposed to be there and avoid getting too close to anyone else.
  • Considering that the uranium plant itself wasn't operational yet, it's not too hard to imagine that the airfield was likewise incomplete. And it makes some sense that they'd prioritize building the airstrip over building a fence, since they're (apparently) in a remote location and they're not expecting any sort of ground assault. Meanwhile, the entire base just exploded a couple minutes ago and maybe everyone's just busy putting out fires or evacuating people from the blast zone. There's a good chance that the usual chain of command has been scrambled too, if it's not clear who's alive and who's dead and which standing orders are relevant right now. Of course it's still pretty amazing that Maverick and Rooster manage to pull this off, but it's plausible enough.
  • If you look closely enough, there is a fence, although the missile strike seems to have destroyed most of it by the time Maverick and Rooster show up.

Maverick blows up the hypersonic prototype

• At the beginning, Maverick makes a test flight to prove the prototype can do Mach 10. He succeeds, but then pushes a little too far and destroys the aircraft. He's later said to have saved the program, albeit temporarily. How? The loss of a multi-million dollar test aircraft is usually a massive setback for a program, if not its end.
  • Presumably whoever controlled funding for the Darkstar project was won over by the prospect of having a manned aircraft that had proven itself capable of reaching Mach 10, deciding that the technology was worth the cost of building a new prototype. Yeah, realistically the program would probably get axed, but it's still believable enough to work here.
    • Particularly possible if a second prototype was already under construction and they didn't want it to go to waste.
    • The Navy contract specified production if the prototype could hit Mach 10. The production model will always be a little different from the prototype and if the prototype survives training it's either scrapped or (more likely now) put in a museum. The loss of the prototype would only end the program if it was destroyed before achieving the project goals.

Why didn't Maverick pull his own ejection handle when Rooster's didn't work?

• At the climax of the film, Maverick realizes that they can't beat the remaining enemy fighter since they're out of ammo and can't escape from the faster and more maneuverable Su-57 so he orders Rooster to pull his ejection handle to initiate ejection. Rooster tries to pull the handles but they don't work. Maverick doesn't even try to pull his handles; the ejection system on the F-14 can be initiated by either the pilot or the RIO as both seats have the same system and the Tomcat will fire both seats if either one is activated.
  • Because neither seat was 'armed.' In order for an Ejection Seat to fire, it first must be armed. This is typically part of the pre-flight procedure for any aircraft, and is usually done before the pilot takes the runway. Now, in the Hornets, the ejection seat arming lever is by your right knee, and is such an obvious thing that it's easy to tell if the seat is armed or not. On the F-14A however, the ejection seat arming switch is a little switch on the top of the seat. Easy for ground crew to notice if they're working on the cockpit, but difficult for the pilot to notice in a pinch. Mav would likely have been trained on this, but since it'd been a while since he'd flown a Tomcat, he likely forgot about it. Rooster on the other hand had never been trained on the F-14, and never knew to even check. So in effect, neither of them armed their respective seats, and therefore, could not eject no matter how hard they tugged those ejection handles.
  • We see earlier in the film that Phoenix does not eject from her stricken F-18 until after Bob, her WSO, does. Whether this is doctrine or not I don't know, but in Maverick's case I think he would want to make sure that Rooster got out safely before worrying about himself.
    • It's not doctrine. It's how the ejection seats are designed to fire. The rear seat goes first, then the front one. Once someone engages the ejection system, the canopy blows off, then both seats will fire regardless of who initiated the ejection. Had the system worked correctly, Maverick's seat would have fired a moment after Rooster's did. He would not have needed to initiate ejection himself.

I brought the whole aircraft carrier so I'm going to use the whole aircraft carrier

• Any pretense of a covert operation are already out the window with the deployment of an aircraft carrier and that the (non-stealthy) jets are going to be detected anyway on their way out, so why not increase the chances of mission success by attaching additional squadrons for SEAD, air-to-air, the whole shebang?
  • My best guess is that they went in with the minimum necessary force because additional force might encourage the enemy to make a large-scale retaliation. The impression you want to leave them with is "America will blow up any illegal uranium plant you build, so don't even try, but if you stick to the treaty you can still be on good terms with us." On the other hand, if the impression they get is "America hates your guts and will happily kill as many of your people as possible," then maybe that country starts making aggressive moves against America. Maybe they make alliances with our enemies. Maybe they cut off trade with us and our allies. Maybe they gear up for a full-scale war. So it's important to give the impression that this is just a targeted strike and not something bigger.
    • Two counterpoints: Operation Opera, the Israeli raid on Iraq's under-construction nuclear reactor was conducted with eight F-16s with an escort of six F-15s, and Operation Praying Mantis used the full force of a carrier and three surface action groups to sink multiple Iranian ships in retaliation for an American frigate striking a mine. "Proportionate" response doesn't mean holding back - it means achieving the desired response as efficiently and effectively as possible. Using only four planes was Maverick's idea - it unnecessarily put pilots and the mission at risk. Opera was only as small as it was because of the long trip over hostile territory and limited numbers of F-16s, factors a carrier right off the coast does not have to consider.
  • Here's a Doylist answer: The script was originally written in 2012, and at that point the F-35 wasn't in service yet. Obviously the movie got delayed, so they added a line where Maverick explains that they can't use F-35s for the bombing run because the enemy is jamming GPS around the base. But even if that's true it raises another question: Can't we send in F-35s to defend the F-18s from the enemy's "fifth-generation fighters"? The thing is, back in 2012 we only had F-18s, and the story was that the enemy had these new fighters that F-18s couldn't really handle. So at that point your best bet is to blow up the airfield so your enemy can't put planes in the sky and then get the F-18s back to the carrier before the enemy sends more planes from some other base. Sending additional F-18s to protect the first batch of F-18s is a waste, because if fifth-generation fighters show up then presumably everyone gets killed. There's even a line where the commander says something like "I'm not sending more people to die!" I think that line was written for a 2012 scenario where F-35s wouldn't be available.
    
    So long story short, the idea was that they only sent four planes because any additional planes wouldn't have been able to accomplish anything and would just get uselessly killed if it came to a dogfight. (Of course Maverick ends up blowing a hole in that logic, but that's the point. Maverick is The Ace and he's always pulling off "impossible" stunts.) The deployment of the F-35 in real life threw off that plot point, but apparently the writers decided to mostly just stick to the story they'd already written. (Switching back to Watsonian mode, we might imagine that the enemy's new fighters were actually so advanced that even the F-35s wouldn't be able to handle them. Though that would require the enemy to make a truly amazing leap in fighter design, and it would probably push Maverick's victory from "amazing" to "ridiculous").
    • The easiest way to explain all this is to figure that F-35 development just happened differently in the Top Gun universe. For whatever reason, their F-35s simply aren't capable of dogfighting and can only be used as bombers (and in this case they can't even be used as bombers because the base has GPS jamming). Presumably better versions of the F-35 are still in the works, but the government wants to bomb the uranium plant as soon as possible. Thus, everyone's forced to use F-18s (which are completely outclassed by the enemy's new aircraft.)
    • Presumably the F-35s in the Top Gun-iverse are also incapable of the SEAD role, despite that being one of the primary missions of the F-35 in Real Life (that's one of the selling points of their stealth capabilities, being able to sneak up on Anti-Air batteries). But then, if the F-35s had been suppressing the SAM batteries, Maverick wouldn't have had the opportunity for his thrilling heroics protecting Rooster, and there would be no opportunity for the climactic dogfight, as Dagger squad would have been feet wet long before any of the enemy fighters caught up to them.

No One Could Survive That!

• How did Maverick survive the Darkstar breaking up at Mach 10.2? At high altitude that's around 6,800 mph. Wouldn't the wind resistance alone have torn him apart?
  • Various other high-speed aircraft like the B-58 and XB-70 have escape capsules rather than just seats to protect the pilots during ejection, although the SR-71 relied on the protection of the pressure suit instead, so either method could be used.
  • Adding to the above, IIRC, it wasn't clear that the Darkstar was still at 10.2 when Maverick ejected. He was at 10.2 and alarms started going off, and the next thing we see is the debris of the Darkstar flying through the air. But there might have been a minute or two between those shots where the alarms were blaring but the plane hadn't truly fallen apart yet, and Mav spent that time frantically reducing speed so he could eject safely.
    • In fact in the last shot we see of Maverick in the cockpit of the Darkstar he is pulling back hard on the throttle.

Purpose of the Darkstar

Is there a given reason for the Darkstar program? Its conflict with drones suggests a reconnaissance role, but its speed doesn't exactly fit the needs for long-endurance patrolling which is already filled by drones, satellites, and other planes. Demonstration of hypersonic flight technologies? Setting a speed record? Developing their own hypersonic plane since the Air Force was working on the SR-72? All of the above?

• I think the Darkstar's purpose is surveillance. And it's not in direct conflict with drones; it's just that the guy in charge has a preference for drones. Presumably he thinks that high-speed manned surveillance planes aren't worth the expense and he thinks the military should focus on comparatively low-cost drones with long-endurance capabilities. Of course a plane that can do Mach 10 has advantages, like the fact that it's really damn hard for the enemy to shoot it down. Satellites are hard to kill too, but then you've got issues of timing and cloud cover and the off-chance that they get jammed somehow or even permanently shut down via cyberattack. So basically there's all kinds of recon tech, and that's how the Darkstar got funded, but this one guy thinks that it's a dumb idea and he's looking for a chance to shut down development.
• Another possibility is that Darkstar is a modern attempt at a penetrator aircraft, capable of flying right through enemy air defenses at hypersonic speeds, dropping munitions deep behind enemy lines, and returning home before the enemy even knows what hit them. Perhaps the Admiral prefers drones despite Darkstar's massive upside because they're the cheaper and safer option, and he doesn't want to take a chance on unproven and extremely expensive hypersonic technology.

How did the "rogue nation" even expect to supply their enrichment facility?

Satellite and mission planning imagery in the film clearly shows the enrichment facility's sole access point at the bottom of a giant "bowl" is completely surrounded by one or more mountains which the attack team must crest to assault it and then again when they want to leave the area. No tunnels into the facility's area appear to exist. How did the supposed "rogue nation" expect to haul unenriched uranium into their brand-new facility, or enriched uranium out? Would they just airlift it, e.g. by helicopter, in and out over the surrounding mountain ridges? Because that looked like an extremely difficult flight even for modern military jets.

• No tunnels appear on screen or are shown in the maps and diagrams of the facility, but that doesn't mean there are no tunnels. There would be no reason to show the ground access tunnels in all the maps and diagrams used in planning an airstrike. If some sort of commando raid had been planned instead then the tunnels would be relevant.
• Even if there are no tunnels, the main reason the flight into the site is so difficult is all the SAMs and the 5th-generation fighters guarding the area. Any flights supplying the facility wouldn't have to worry about being shot down by their own SAMs and fighters. They could take their time flying in and out and wouldn't have to fly up the canyon at low altitude.
  • Adding to this, the rogue nation would obviously use helicopters instead of jets for any sort of supply drop that went directly to the base. Jets are designed to go fast, but their weakness is that they need to keep up a minimum speed in order to stay airborne at all. This makes it very hard to navigate closely around a mountain, because if you slow down to a comfortable speed then your wings no longer generate lift and the jet just falls out of the sky. Helicopters, in contrast, can go as slow as they like, so navigating a helicopter close to a mountain is easy. (This is why they send helicopters to rescue stranded mountain climbers; nobody in their right mind would send a jet!) But the U.S. can't use helicopters in this case, because the helicopters would very quickly get blown up by the enemy.

The best fighter pilots in the world?

How exactly do they determine these days who are "the best fighter pilots in the world" when as Maverick says they pretty much only drop bombs and engage in no dogfighting?

• They compete in practice dogfights, as shown in the film.
• All of the pilots appearing in the film are Top Gun graduates. This means that their unit COs selected them as the best pilots in their units and that they completed the dogfighting courses at Top Gun. It may not literally make them the best in the world, but it means they did manage to outfly everyone else in the U.S. navy.

Why was there a limit on Top Gun pilots to attack the facility

• He only could choose 4 planes. Why not have 6 or 8 planes?
  • After Maverick looks over the mission he says it would be "two precision bombs, minimum, makes it four aircraft flying in pairs." He also says it's so dangerous that "someone won't be coming back from this." They send the minimum number of planes for the mission because it is such a dangerous mission.
  • The planes have to come in almost single-file because of the extremely narrow gap in the air defenses. As soon as the first missile hits the uranium facility the enemy aircraft are alerted and it becomes a race to the sea, one which the trailing US fighters would barely win even in their optimistic projections. So if they added *more* fighters, the guys in the back would be guaranteed to get intercepted on the return flight even if the bombing went perfectly.
  • More aircraft also means more time in enemy airspace. Since they can only enter the canyon single file as we see.

Why didn't they use the F-35s against the target or the air defenses?

• There is a Hand Wave about GPS jamming around the target, but unless the F-35 lacks laser-targeting capabilities (at least, without compromising their stealth with external mounts), that should not have effected them any worse than it did the F-18s. Even then, it certainly wouldn't have prevented them from carrying out SEAD strikes against the SAM batteries to cover Dagger squad's escape, as SEAD tactics often involve targeting the radars that most SAM batteries use to target enemy aircraft. Maverick even notes that the F-35s' stealth capabilities would have protected them from the air defenses. Knocking out the air defenses would have also made Dagger squad's withdrawal much faster, meaning everyone would be out of dodge before the enemy fighters could catch up.
  • There's actually a much more logical reason, at least for them not being the primary strike aircraft for the mission. While the F-35 is more than capable of carrying everything the F/A-18s depicted in the movie can, the F-35C's air frame is still limited to 7.5gs. Later model F/A-18s have been strengthened to a limit of 9gs. So the F-35C has a greater chance of structural failure in the heavy g pull they have to do after striking their target.
    • Although that ignores the fact that the F-35 would not need to perform the heavy g maneuver the Hornets did to lay in their attack, as that maneuver was driven by the need to hug the terrain of the mountain and crater during the attack run in order to avoid the SAM batteries, and the presumed role of F-35s on this raid would be to target the batteries themselves. This in turn would mean the Hornets wouldn't need to perform the heavy G maneuver either. Losing the element of surprise by attacking the SAM batteries is presumably not a concern, as it is exceedingly unlikely that the enemy forces failed to notice the massive volley of missiles launched by the carrier group to destroy the nearby airfield as soon as Dagger Squad went Feet Dry.

Why didn't Maverick use an F- 35 during dogfight training?

• Although in the first training it made sense to fly an F/A-18 as well, so as to show the trainees what he could do and what they had to learn to do, during the mission, I do not understand why, when it was time to pretend to be an enemy fifth-generation fighter, in the subsequent trainings, Maverick did not fly an F-35.
  • First of all, the dogfight training was only to show the trainees that Maverick could beat them and for Maverick to get an idea of their flying abilities. It was not to train them to beat fifth-generation fighters in an F/A-18. The entire mission planning centered on how to get in and out before the enemy fighters could intercept them so there wouldn't have to be any dogfighting. In the actual mission the planes that are not shot down by the SAMs do in fact get away cleanly and don't have to fight the enemy fighters.
  • Secondly, An F-35 has very different weapons and performance from an Su-57, the fifth-generation fighters guarding the facility. For instance the F-35 does not have thrust vectoring and has a slower maximum speed than the Su-57. Training against an F-22 would be more similar, but the Navy doesn't have any F-22s, it's strictly an Air Force plane.
  • As far as we know, Maverick has never flown or even trained on an F-35. Fighter jet training isn't one-size-fits-all, learning a new aircraft takes months or even years, and for obvious reasons, that wasn't an option for Mav.

F- 35

• The mission would have been cakewalk for the F-35 anyway, jamming or not. Growlers would jam the radar sites while F-35s take out the SAMs, deal with fighters from standoff range, and use their own built-in targeting pods to hit the ventilation shaft. Or even just clear the way for heavy bombers to drop bunker busters.
  • There's a plausible argument that the pilot workload necessary to fly the course and make the attack while simultaneously lasing the target, is too much for a single pilot to do, hence the requirement for the 2-seat Foxtrot on the mission... except that Maverick went and did just that.
    • That may be true, but Maverick seems to be the only pilot skilled enough to pull it off. And since he seemingly doesn't have experience with the F-35, him and the rest of the team are stuck with the Hornets.
    • The whole point of using Growlers and F-35s would be to avoid the need for super-skills altogether, and —as the movie itself put it— the need for two miracles to occur. With the air defenses disabled and/or destroyed, laser-guided bombs could be dropped from hundreds or even thousands of feet up, hitting the target much more reliably than the F-18s had to with a targeting window of only a few seconds. There was literally no advantage to using F-18s for this mission; it only put the pilots needlessly at risk.
  • Stealth and jamming have their limits against SAMs, trying to take out that many launchers could result in heavy losses for the Navy even with both of those factors in play. And that of course could lead to the already dangerous rogue nation learning the F-35's secrets from its wreckage. The canyon run may be more risky for each individual pilot, but it's less risky for the Navy overall.
  • As noted above, The F-35 actually wouldn't be able to pull this mission off, at least as described in the movie. The F-35C (The Navy's version of the F-35) is currently only rated to a maximum of 7Gs on the frame. Later versions of the F-18 however have been strengthened to take upwards of 9Gs. While this doesn't mean it would fall apart immediately if it pulls 9, it does mean there is a higher chance of structural failure during sustained 9G maneuvers than with the Super Hornet.

How did Maverick take a plane up to do his test run?

• Cyclone is in a briefing with all the pilots, telling them that Maverick is no longer their instructor. Then he turns around and sees Maverick on the radar screen and hears over the radio Maverick request clearance from the Rangemaster. The Rangemaster even says there is nothing scheduled. Pilots can't just take planes for "joyrides" without somebody, somewhere in a myriad of areas (Ex. His plane's ground crew, The Runway crew, the Control tower, etc.) noticing and calling it in.
  • Presumably Maverick had ingratiated himself (with the help of his reputation) with the various crews enough to get them to hold off reporting what he was doing until he was in a position to demonstrate that the mission could be flown. He probably even told them "I'm trying to save the lives of those pilots." He took up the Darkstar in an essentially unauthorized flight at the beginning of the movie with the cooperation of his crews (foreshadowing).

"No Mav, your idea is stupid."

• Feasibility of the operation aside, how come no one in the entire Navy, Pentagon, presumably up the President (since this is highly sensitive operation) took a single look at Maverick's borderline suicidal plan and shot it down and proposed alternatives? Even other, higher-ranking officers that hated him somehow didn't think that they could put together something better than sending four Hornets, loaded for ground attack, unsupported between the enemy's buttcheeks. There is no reason for them to listen to a reckless aviator who's been unable to reach flag rank for thirty years.
  • It wasn't Maverick's idea. The scene early in the movie where Mav describes how he would fly the mission is not Maverick planning the raid, it's Maverick proving that he understands the situation by coming up with the same attack plan that the mission planners did before they called him in. The mission plan was already approved. They had even already picked the pilots to fly it - the only remaining piece of planning was confirming that Maverick would be the one to train the selected pilots.