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you're watching a special edition of the blue angel phantoms podcast our guest this episode is frank walleye wiser a retired u.s navy commander and former member of the blue angels and most recently a stunt pilot in the box office
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sensation movie top gun maverick while walleye's going to detail his time in the navy including his tenure with the blue angels and their most recent transition to the f-18 super hornet later on in the podcast walleye is going to tell us how he ended up on the set of
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top gun maverick and give insight into those iconic scenes we've seen in the movie trailer but first we open up the discussion with commander wiser's recent attendance at the movie premiere so sit back relax and please welcome frank
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walley-weiser to the podcast all right welcome to the blue angel phantoms podcast i'm your host ryan notop and super excited to be joined today by retired u.s navy commander
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former blue angel and now someone who's joined the fruits of their labor watching the release of top gun maverick coming out in movie theaters may 27 2022 commander wiser frank walleye wiser thank you so much for joining me here in
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the podcast yeah it's great to be with you thank you ryan yeah um so you were just down in the premiere of top gun last week were you in san diego i was yep we went down to my wife and i uh had the opportunity to go to san
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diego and watch it in the lowry theater at naval air station north island with a huge navy contingent to include the whole top gun staff and then also privileged to go that evening into downtown pacific theater to watch it
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with the paramount group oh nice um did you uh did you see the events that took place on the midway there with tom cruise flying navy folks i think that was more oppressed thing at first i misunderstood they were going to show the movie out there but i do believe
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tom and jerry had the actors all show up there just to kind of do a big press hit oh gotcha and did they join you for the actual premiere uh in the movie theater yeah a number of them were there at the naval station um tom was there jerry bruckheimer was
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there the director joe was there and then uh the secretary of the navy was there notably um and they all came into the theater on the base to kind of introduce it and then that evening um in the theater downtown there were
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some introductions and and kind of um thanksgiving to certain parties and uh tom was on stage for that as was um the director and the producer again and then the writer committee so and then all the actors were there as well that was i
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think that that event was the big proper premiere yeah one thing i saw on social media was that um tom cruise was aboard the carl vinson and they actually had a former blue angel hornet on there do you know any background on that that was really
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cool to see you know i didn't know about the uh blue angel hornet on there this the ceo that carrier is a close friend of mine and so i do know i'd spoken with him and his wife earlier that day and so i think tom and he and their cmc were going to ride up the elevator and
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introduce it to the crew so i think paramount really went out of their way to try and make this a navy thing not just a hollywood thing and so by virtue of just being in san diego and showing it first in the theater on the base and
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then doing the hit at the both on the midway and on the vinson i yeah it was very very cool a lot of sailors saw it before anybody else awesome well i want to ask you a lot more about top gun before we do that i wanted to talk more about your
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background both in the navy and in the blue angel specifically so uh i know you are an atlanta guy but you graduated the naval academy class of 2000. um did you see top gun growing up and was inspired
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to you know go to the naval academy or you know was your journey to the navy kind of more circumstantial or i did see it i did love it um i i also did not go to the academy just to fly airplanes i think if they would allow us to if you
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could select fighters or carriers or something from flight school would be a different ballgame there's such a um i had not flown before so my in my opinion my chance of flying anything really cool was very slim so i had gone there to be a navy seal
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the naval academy chooses for you of what you get to do but it's been just a real dream and a blessing for us the whole time and i definitely think my skill sets are probably more in favor of flying than um
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being a seal but that is how i ended what i'm doing awesome and uh you know the blue angels traditionally fly over the naval academy graduation i assume they flew over years did you look up and thinking man one day i'm
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gonna be one of those jets or did that not even go through your mind you know as you go back through times in your life where you clearly remember things me sitting there as having if i'd ever seen him before i hadn't remembered him so sitting there was a plea at the naval
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academy at the end of my first year just by the dorms watching the show and the sneak pass came in from behind and i almost fell off like a 30 foot wall and i i distinctly remember the time saying that's probably the coolest thing i've ever seen
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and it really bodes well that i was eventually able to do that and not stuck in the diamonds i want to talk about uh your kind of first year actually uh after your graduation and and i kind of want to put
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in context to to the same time period in my life which were probably very different because there was probably three hours that changed all of american history or really the world right and i'm talking about september 11th and you're a year into your military career
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and i look back at where i was on september 11th i was in my second year college and quite frankly not much really changed in my life going forward unfortunately we had someone at my school her name was nicole miller she was on flight 93 who we learned passed
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away but yet you know my life went on i went on to go to college get an internship nothing changed other than people putting american flags on their trucks and blasting martina mcbride in the parking lot at school but uh
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you know i was able to have that experience because of people like you and your peers in the armed forces and so i'm assuming that your life changed dramatically when you were watching those events um and so would you know
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one you know thank you to you and your peers for allowing people like us to be at home and and live our lives uh while you volunteer to defend freedom but what was your 911 experience like you know just a year into your naval career sure
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yeah i was in meridian mississippi going through flight school i was a t2 student at the time so intermediate training and i was in the sim when it happened and i distinctly remember the instructor said something's going on here but we're gonna we're gonna finish this sim and so
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we did and then we come out and debrief and then we're watching on tv and then um same guy said well let's go do sim number two so we finished our sims for that day and then after that it changed pretty dramatically i feel like you know both for everybody that he didn't fly
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for a short period took hours to get on the base that sort of thing but the other interesting aspect of it was as you're going through flight school and you have um you know the mentorship of all the instructors that are there and they're explaining to you what fleet
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life is like and why you choose one platform and the other and one coast over the other a lot of all of their information was pre-911 because they had cruised and so you'd hear the stories of the med cruises you know go east coast and you'll have a six-month cruise on an
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aircraft carrier and you'll hit all the medports and maybe the families travel with and you know meet up with courts and all that and of course that hasn't happened since 2000 but that was certainly the
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the prevailing experience of the time and you know all of my deployments have been you know essentially get on the aircraft here go direct to the middle east stay there as long as the carrier can withstand it and then come straight home
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with maybe a port on the way if you're lucky so um it has been a very changed navy ever since well certainly naval aviation ever since 9 11. yeah and uh were you apprehensive when it happened
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that man my navy life's going to be a lot different or were you glad that you were in the service that you had an opportunity to you know i think you know if there's any primary emotion to be feeling like i was going
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to miss it you know that my friends who maybe went to flight school six months earlier or finished faster for various pipeline reasons might get out and get to serve and then i'd be on the tail end of it or something so clearly that hasn't
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happened yeah so but you didn't uh go to the after you got winged i think what the year 2003 you didn't immediately hop in and go to the fleet you were a flight instructor
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i was yeah they have a small program where they'll keep one or two people a year and you'll be a they call a selectively retained graduate something to that effect and um so i was a flight instructor for about a year and a half after i finished and that was another concern of mine at
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the time was that you know the action be over and not i missed it all but um my year and a half flying t-45s and rain was about from a flying perspective the most fun i've ever had i was flying with my friends and i really was comfortable
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and loved the airplane and i learned a lot and it was just a remarkable year for a brand new pilot and then you transitioned to the hornet was it the legacy hornet or the super hornet yep i went legacy yeah up to
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virginia beach and uh you know what squadron and i assume then you did get deployed obviously yeah i joined the squadron uh following the rag vfa 87 and the the skipper then was also a formula angel
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dave silke wolfie silky and so he was my first fleet skipper and um obviously a great mentor for the blue angels and explained a lot about how the team worked and you know the whole background of the organization
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and so i served in in the war party for two years and then went to the blues in the summer of those seven from there yeah nice um and real quick you know there's that famous quote from neil armstrong about you know landing on the moon was easier than landing on a
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carrier at night how was your personal experience learning how to land on a carrier night well yeah i've heard most people say it's about the most fun thing you can do in the whole world during the daytime in the night time i my experience was that
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um it wasn't scary at all until i had my first unsafe landing and then from that point on i was very apprehensive and very you know well prepared is not the term but um focused for sure uh for every night
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carrier landing and it's one of those things and i think it's true about most guys you when you wake up and you know you have a night launch or two night flights you think about it all day long it's something that you have to mentally prepare for because it's not easy and
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you're well aware of your own limitations and the um how to mitigate all the other dangers around the aircraft carrier so it's uh it can be a challenging thing and that my jo deployment um i had one if not two months where all of my
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landings were at night because we were night caring we did a lot of night ops and i distinctly remember having a day flight after maybe two months of only night flights and i was literally scared to land on the aircraft carrier during the
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day because i had no clue how to do that because it's a bit of a different thing and once you do it a lot it's it's easy but when we only flew at night they make it pretty easy you just come straight in you just have to be on your a-game towards the very end
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wow and uh you referenced dave silke um was he the one that kind of officially encouraged you to submit an application to the blue angels or his exo um frank marley my career timing was weird
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because of the server time and of course i didn't appreciate that when i was a brand new aviator that how that affects you that it really takes out the opportunity to go to top gun or to go to test pilot school or any of the other sort of one-off things because of some
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timing issues prior to department heads and i didn't know that at the time but blue angels was kind of a unique little way to get me back on track and um and of course an incredible opportunity to serve too so they both explained that to me how did
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you learn you made the blue angels usually that's a fun story did they kind of do the traditional prank where they kind of told you you didn't make the team and then yeah i did not expect to make the team i've been given some tipper that i wasn't going to make the team and so i had gone home and i was
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just sitting there in my office my wife was there but i didn't want to call it was a friday i didn't want to call from the squadron and laughed at by all my buddies so i had gone home and was frankly shocked that we made it and then then you jump
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right into preparations to move in another month and your first year you were the narrator right uh were you excited to be the narrator or were you a little eager to get in the jet and start flying demos no i was i
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was really excited to be the narrator i mostly because it's a path towards five and six and that looked exceptionally incredibly fun to me um but the narrator job also was um unique from both the being in front of the crowd and from the
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lg to to do all the vip flights and media flights and that was a one of those things where it's your only chance to ever do something like that so i was very excited to do that i loved it and i flew with dana mcshane he was number eight and we just had an
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incredibly fun year together flying around and my crew chiefs and i had a blast and i'm still keeping touch with them years later so i loved being number seven i thought it was a hoot and you know the opportunity to fly
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later was fine as well um exciting i do remember being really really proud i joined with gopher and dino uh dino brontous and gopher swinger and watching them fly their first air show i was like uh
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i don't know i just remember being emotional because we joined together and then i'm watching them fly this show and it was really it was overwhelming to me that they had learned as fast as they had and they were as good as they were so it was a lot of emotions during that
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blue angel experience and so then you joined the demo the following year i think 2010 is the opposing solo did your year as narrator help you prepare for that or were you still
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drinking from a fire hose in winter training yeah it does definitely helps you prepare a lot of what i think that's done deliberately the seven profile that you take the media riders and the influencers on that's built in a large part around the
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solo profile so you do a lot of the same maneuvers and so it is you're a lot more comfortable in the airplane and you're more comfortable with the calm and the maneuvers so i think it helps a lot actually it's going to be hard no matter
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what you don't do any you know you do very limited formation flying as number seven just on transits so that's primarily the um skill set you have to learn to be able to do it well but yeah it's it's hard no matter what you do winter training is
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such a brutal time for everyone that um you could prepare as much as you thought you could as number seven but you're still going to be drinking from the pharaohs gotcha and then just the g profiles are they increase when you join the blue
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angel from uh standard fleet pilot do you need to do any i mean like the blues are known for their physical regiment to upkeep their their fitness but is there that much increased g when you join the blue angels that you really need to maintain that there is yeah it's
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twofold obviously the g profile is much greater and then the lack of the g suit just means that you have very limited margin for error and so i would play in my last three years was working on the transition and a lot of what i did was
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trying to mitigate the flee which is essentially the damage to the airplane that the pilot puts on it through high gs and it's actually the high g's are one thing the high negative g's are really bad for the aircraft in the long
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run and so the the engineers who built the f-18 were able to show me a graph and it depicted what the original f-18 engineers had said this airplane was expected to fly and that would be it was
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supposed to have one or one 7g pull you know every one flight hour or two a flight hour or something like that and it was supposed to have one negative 3g push once every 10 000 hours or
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something like that and what the blue angels were doing was i mean from a positive g perspective it was off the charts from a negative g perspective it was unthinkable and so it would take an
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airplane that should last six thousand hours or eight thousand hours and if we if we flew especially in the solo profile it would last three or four hundred hours and then it was cooked um and so i was trying really hard to find
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ways to rethink our demo from a jeep profile without anyone being able to notice that it was reduced meaning even your most astute angel fan wouldn't be able to tell that you changed anything but you would get a lot of benefit back
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in terms of the flight hours remaining on those jets and so that was that's telling and of course as i would explain to the engineers the the damage we put on the airplanes is also damage we put on the bodies the human body feels that
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positive negative g just like the airplane does and it damages us too i'm sure i just don't think there are enough studies to show whether we're shorter or you know more uh mentally disabled or whatever it has however has affected us
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i think is is very much a thing wow and then uh so your next year you then become the lead solo can you talk to me about the difference between lead solo and opposing solo as far as uh
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you know responsibilities and and just difference in flying sure yeah i mean the profile remains fairly similar you have a few different maneuvers that you do you join the line of grass loop which is always a challenging maneuver for everyone um and
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especially someone who hadn't followed you before but primarily the challenge is being responsible for your wing and it's um it is a responsibility and i think every but every element lead
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certainly the boss feels this way and certainly i felt this was five but you believe this person's um life is in your hands to some degree meaning that you've trained them properly and that during the air show you are
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responsible for yourself and for them because they're new and they're learning and there's so little room for error so it's it's a challenge and it's exciting and to watch someone that you've trained learn the profile that and learn it well
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enough that they can pass it on and you can continue every year to just be a little bit better as an organization is really the challenge which one did you like better i love them both i mean the thing about
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i've always i've said this for almost my entire navy career since the news is that the number six job seems to be about the most fun job in the whole navy from the flying perspective you have very limited ground jobs because your whole focus is supposed to be to learn to fly the demo and to do it safely
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and it's essentially the same profile but number five you're so busy writing the squadron as the operations officer that the flying becomes should be second nature by that point and so you just have a very different year so number six is just a really really incredible year
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and when i went back and was doing it as a commander it wasn't lost on me what a good deal i had for that short time so you eventually left the team and then as you've already referenced you came back to the team
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what did you do in between um your your stints on the blues sure when i left there i went through safety school because i was already in pensacola and that school was there and then i joined vfa 97 the warhawks as a department head
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and went through all the normal department progressions safety admin maintenance knobs and we were there for two and a half years in lamar um and my timing was such that i was deployed basically the whole time i think we were
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at sea for 22 months out of 30 months and then on debt another three months so that was a really challenging time for our family because we were just gone so much and that was just
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the times and and we were the carrier at that point so we come back from a plan deployment of seven months and then we surge immediately thereafter for eight months plus it was i learned a lot you know of
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course i love my squadron i love the people i served with and we did a lot of good stuff at sea we were the first aircraft carrier to put rockets on our planes since vietnam war and the tragedy and the fire that
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followed so i felt like we did great things to support our country but as a family it was quite challenging and then following that and in large part because of that
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i chose to do a joint job over in germany so i went to the nato school in south germany it was good for our family i finally i met my kids again or for the first time in some cases and got to we had to spend a lot of really cool time together as a family we weren't i wasn't
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flying in any capacity i was just teaching nato to the nato nations and our partner nations and i intended to be done after that and moved back to north georgia and kind of transitioned
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to a civilian role then obviously um cooch passed away in june of 2016 and through a odd turn of events the ceo who had been the training
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officer for me when i was a junior officer called me and said they were had some fairly limited options and would it be possible for you to rejoin the team in 2016. and so you did rejoin the team and obviously as you've already referenced
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you're now a commander flying the opposing solo number six um is that hard transitioning on as a commander into the number six position
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um what was your dynamic like with the elite solo who technically i guess is you know junior to you um how's that dynamic between the two of you uh actually i think what i was most concerned about was would i be able to
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fly the air show at all because i hadn't flown anything for almost three years at that point so i was a bit apprehensive that i'd even remember how to fly and i went up to for the rag for a week in oceania and i had a junior officer of mine from my
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department tour who was then the natops officer for the whole navy and i said come to my sims and really put me through the pain train and i got i sat in the sim i couldn't turn the airplane on i i hadn't used a checklist in the morning for
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years and years and i just said oh shoot what do i do first you know and i almost had to treat it like playing the piano or something where you haven't done you close your eyes and your hands know what to do but your brain is tricking you your eyes are triggering you so
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after a second it comes back to you really fast but um after you know a couple hours in the f-18 and then hopping back down pensacola um the lease all the time was a guy named droopy chamberlain and so and he had been on my deployments when i
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was a department head and he was a jayo and i i think i even said a lot of recommendations for him at some point so i knew him well and i didn't know the rest of the junior officers i only knew the boss and so getting back into the airplane
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was i thought it'd be incredibly challenging and it turns out it came back really fast and i was really thank god that it did because um we had a couple weeks to get me up to speed and then we're off and running to the you know the fall air
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show season and it it's a testament to the training we do on the blue angels that it becomes you do it you fly so much and you fly so regularly and so consistently and so um accurately to the profile on the stand
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that to get back in it was the only thing that challenged me was actually the changes that had happened from in the 2010 until the start of 2016 and there were some minor changes and those were hard to take on board because i was so used to doing it my way
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but in general everything came back pretty fast and working with droopy wasn't hard at all it was uh you know i had flown more and i've been on the blue angels perhaps you know during a different time but we were still solo pilots and he was the
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lead so that's how that goes and you stayed on for 2017 is there a maneuver that you thought was either the most challenging or most difficult um during your your tenure you know either
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stint or is there one that you just enjoyed more than others i'm obviously smiling because we we have a lot of element rivalry and so i've already gotten my one diamond dig in for the day um i would say i
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i like i love all our maneuvers i i think it's easy to say that the delta was essentially my favorite time i would joke that was my rest time with them that i could finally not have to leave i could just follow somebody else and let them do all the work but what i loved
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about it was that it was teamwork and so you know you have a maneuver like the loot break cross where it's all six you you you've broken up you've rejoined with very limited time you've gotten together again and now you split and you come back and and boy when you have a
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perfect six playing cross at center point you know that's the cast meow i think that you've all done this together it's really really hard i don't think anyone can appreciate exactly how hard it is and so i think that best showcases their
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aircraft's capabilities the pilot's capabilities the team's capabilities the whole shebang so all there were there weren't many maneuvers i didn't like but um from a perspective of being a blue angel i'm
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really appreciating the team i'd say that the delta stuff and specifically the loot break was the best awesome and then so you left the team but but kind of not really because then as you've already referenced you assisted the team in transition and you
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talked about some of the work you did there uh talking about the g loading on the plane how did you get engaged in the transition effort and i'm assuming you had super hornet time at some point [Music]
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or nobody been only legacy um three or four thousand hours of legacy time with no rhino time but the airplane is remarkably similar it's heavier to fly it has some unique differences but for the most part it's
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pretty darn similar and you and for that reason it only takes five hours you can go take a couple courses you take a couple online lectures and then you're flying a thing and it's it's pretty much the same switchology is a little bit different
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for some of itself but it's similar and then what actually was very interesting to me is the stuff that is different about it that doesn't really affect fleeting years definitely can affect the blue angels air show so the engineers get better and better and
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what they really do whether they tell it to you're not is they get better at protecting the airplane from the pilot one of the engineers i worked a lot with while during those three years said to me something effective never underestimate a pilot's ability to do something stupid that you couldn't
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anticipate and so they've put a lot of you know the f-18 is a fly-by-wire flight control system so they with just coding and with software they're able to allow you or not allow you to do certain things
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to protect the airplane and uh some of those things are definitely good for the longevity of the superboyant some of them are very bad i mean they didn't anticipate this airplane being flown for prolonged
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periods upside down for example and so they have um put in some reductions so that for example if you're inverting and you have a negative angle of attack which means you're essentially your
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relative guy slope to the wind or your relative position it it doesn't allow you to roll at the same degree in the same rate that you would when you're upright and how that can really negatively
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affect you is you know if you're the diamond and you're in the double fargo and you get slow then when you want to roll back out you don't roll out the same rate and everything becomes so seated the pants you're used to a certain field when it doesn't roll right it can be very uncomfortable
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in the solo profile we would have the number five on take off just the dirty roll and because you're slow uh you have a lot more negative aoa and so there is an example that i referenced a great deal of a super junior officer
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doing this at an air show in canada where he basically is executing the dirty roll but even with more margin for safety because they are in blower the whole time they bring their gear up whereas we stay dirty and do it at military power to reduce thrust
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and so he goes full left stick and the aircraft starts to roll and then just ceases the roll as it's about inverted and he has full left stick commander but the aircraft won't roll because the airplane is limiting itself
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and he just had too much ford stick put in but at the time didn't know that what was so counter-intuitive was if he had been upside down inverted you're inverted and dirty and unable to roll if you just pulled back on the stick which
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is the last thing you'd ever do because that would put you right to the ground it would have broken the negative alpha and he would have rolled up right that would have been the fastest way to get up right but no one would ever do that and no one really knows that that software has that limiting capability
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because it never comes up and flees so we ran into things like that we ran into um there's a g bucket which protects the aircraft from high g pulls at high speeds so it limits you to five and a half g's when you're above 0.88
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and so that definitely comes up for the solos especially number six when it does the new password behind the crowd where you're typically 0.96 and the danger in my mind was you'd be at 0.96 and you pull as hard as you can the airplane gives you five and a half g's and as it
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decelerates in the climb if at you know at the split second it will go from 0.89 to 0.88 and then you're going to get 7.6 gs and that extra 2gs could easily put someone to sleep if they had a g-string on for just five and
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a half so i felt like it was my job to try to identify what those differences were and try to find a way to mitigate them and try to find a way to accurately cover that in our sop so that the new teams
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over the course of the following years should be able to keep themselves safe and uh have you seen the team in uh 2022 at all fly those i have yep yeah they're looking pretty good they are yeah i
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think it's the challenge for them this year was that it was the first year they've had not a experienced team meaning that in 2020 it was still in legacies and they had coded so they didn't fly a whole lot of air shows they got to practice a lot and they did
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all the flyovers but they got really confident together as a team and then the next year they had rhinos but it was the exact same pilot so they were very very good at flying the airship they were well rehearsed it was a new airplane it was a really
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you know just by the luck of the times it was it worked out really well but it happened that way you could never have predicted that years in advance when we were going through the super hornet process of transitioning but now that they have grant three new pilots in the demo it's
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a challenge for them this year they have to relearn what a normal team goes through through the um el centro process yeah well let's talk top gun so how did you actually get engaged in the
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production of the film as it was explained to me because i'm not 100 sure on all the details but as it was explained to me the navy was meeting with paramount to go over the movie and they hadn't yet
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started filming it was summer of 18 and one of the scenes they were looking for they were referred to as lawrence and radio which was maybe the opening of the movie launch of arabia where you see just a dust cloud and difference in the distance and
00:28:48
eventually this personal horseback comes up and they were looking for a scene where all you can see is just a plume of dust and then you know seconds later this airplane comes with an overhead and they insisted on that airplane being an incredibly low altitude and that was
00:29:01
jerry bruckheimer and tom cruise and then they're having these meetings with who the gentleman who's then the air boss the three star for naval aviation he said we can get a lot of stuff done we can film you know low altitude stuff we can
00:29:13
film carrier stuff and dog fighting bfm but i'm not putting an airplane at 10 or 20 feet and so um as i understood it they kind of got to a point where they said well then we can't
00:29:25
film this this is actually it's critical to the storyline that this happens and so we need to either find a way to do it or we don't do it all and so someone in the back of the room after us in a few weeks had a bright idea to call the blue angels and see if
00:29:37
they had anyone who could do this because we do number five does this routinely we'll fly this new pass at 50 feet and so um it was brought up and of course the team is in the middle of the airshow season you can't you can't pull any one
00:29:49
of the pilots away for a week much less became six or eight separate weeks and so uh i was working with the transition and the call came to us and said you know would you be willing to do this and of course the answer is yes and more flying
00:30:02
is better we weren't flying very much anyway back then so um the irony was that even as the blue angel supermarket transition officer i hadn't yet gotten the super hornet call but the minute the top gun movie kicked into gear i went straight up to ocean
00:30:15
and got my super one ball and then we used a mixture of super hornets with top gun and then sometimes we use our plane there's a scene in the movie where they have this skunk works airplane flyover
00:30:27
you've seen it perhaps even in the preview takes off and does a low transition and then pitches up and so we used one of the blue angel f-18s to do that i did all the that filming out of china lake and armo at the time garrett hopkins was with me as
00:30:39
a safety observer we treated all these things just like we would a blue angel air show and that's how we mitigate it we put one of our com cart guys on the headset we had constant comments back and forth we have we went through all the different knock it off scenarios and
00:30:50
so we did we treated that particular part of the show just like the um number six takeoff we filmed a whole bunch of just slow transitions and so that's in there um there's a blue angel flyby
00:31:02
at a funeral and i won't give the information on that as a spoiler alert or whatever but um i filmed that as well over um north island and that was just a whole bunch of different shots you know pitching up and smoke on smoke off that
00:31:15
sort of thing and then the lawrence of arabia was filmed that fountain um so just a high altitude desert and um just an airplane download nothing tricky to it the trick is to do it repeatedly
00:31:27
at the exact same mountain safely um you know where you can't see where you're i couldn't see the cameras from 12 miles away on downwind as you turn in and you have to get low and set before you can even see them so you're trusting the airplane some degree but they were old
00:31:40
airplanes and the designations kept shifting so and there's not a lot of ground gauge out there so that's the part that became tricky wasn't just being consistent holding the exact outfit it was making sure you show up to the right spot um as far as production i mean were
00:31:54
these all like were these weeks apart or were these like you know you know day to day how would they have the production out for me from october of 18 through june of 19 and it was um a week here a
00:32:05
week there and i think it was at the end six or eight separate weeks of going to all these different places yeah i've heard that some of the kind of maverick helmet shots from behind is that you did they do in any in cockpit filming of you
00:32:19
the only two people that flew with tom were um a junior officer who was a top gun instructor and he was the bfm smee he was um in the bfm shop so all the dog fighting scenes where you see tom i
00:32:30
believe is him flying and then anything that's low out dude with tom flying should be me and so that lawrence radius seen through some of the canyons um that sort of thing would be me and what they do is um
00:32:43
they'll take his hairline and glue to the back of your head so that from the cameras that'll look forward if you see the maverick helmet from behind it's uh it's a you know qualified f-18 pilot flying
00:32:55
but it's meant to look like him and then everything else where you see the pilots flying him included it's all they're on the backseat of the f-18 with just really good cameras that make it look like they're flying you probably never thought you'd be doubling for tom cruise
00:33:07
actually that did come up um and they use that term because that's the hollywood term and so you go into the hair and makeup booth to get ready whether they're gluing the hair on or or um you know they're putting makeup on your neck or they would darken my neck because he had a he had a better tan
00:33:20
than my tasty white skin and so they'd spray paint your neck and then they would eventually put fake um sweat the dab fake sweat on me and i said you know it's june and fallon it's 110 degrees i don't have to do this i'm
00:33:32
gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna produce real sweat here in just seconds um but one of the people in the hair and makeup that said who are you doubling us today and it just caught me off guard and i said uh i'm not doubling as anybody you know you
00:33:45
understand that they're doubling as us right they're faking us and um and everyone you're seeing here all these top gun staff instructors everyone flying they're real pilots and they're they're actually they do this every day and the actors sit in the back
00:33:57
pretending to be the pilot so that term is used pretty regularly uh i just found it funny you know the actors are treated like navy admirals all the time you know when they come in the room
00:34:08
everybody gets quiet and um and everyone tends to their needs and so i could be out free flight in the jet and you're getting pushed out of the way because one of the actors is walking by and all the cameras want to get their eyes on him so i found that to be pretty amusing but
00:34:21
i guess a necessary evil yeah i've watched the makings of the first film several times and you know i guess there were a couple occasions where uh maybe there was some conflict between the production and the navy as
00:34:33
far as how to film a sequence did you ever find yourself pushing back on the production whether it be for safety or realism or yeah that's a great poll that's all i've said in two parts one i know the navy in general the liaison for the movie and
00:34:47
then the air boss the time were very engaged in making sure it was done safely i mean there was you can't say there's a zero risk mindset but they had um a zero risk mindset in terms of doing anything that wasn't necessary to make the movie good
00:34:59
and risking it would be just tr um a tragedy to have to lose an airplane or a pilot to make a movie and they did lose um a civilian pilot during the first one so i believe right they're very engaged to not let that
00:35:12
happen again but what ferg did an exceptional job of was most everyone who flew in that movie was a junior officer in the navy and he he had a lot of people flying different scenes so that they all have
00:35:26
this connection to the movie and so i think that's really really cool i mean the movie is going to inspire young men and women to join and fly no doubt about it but i hope it also keeps a lot of pilots in especially the ones who are involved in the movie because
00:35:38
they have this really cool connection to an awesome feature film um from my perspective what they were asking me to do you know they were everyone was very nervous about this little altitude scene over the desert but aside from trying to locate them this
00:35:50
time it was pretty straightforward the funeral shot was actually one of the hardest ones because it was at sunset and over loma so it's really hard to get low without hitting that mountain because you can't see it as you approach
00:36:02
it so um that and then there's a lot of com back and forth with controllers in san diego and the different airspace restrictions so that was more challenging than even the low altitude stuff um i found there's one scene that you'll see where
00:36:15
it's at the end of that low altitude scene where the airplane comes over the desert and then pulls up and you see it in the previews and in the movie where it approaches it looks like it comes head on and so the people flying the helicopter said all right once you're done um the minute you fly over the
00:36:28
cameras just pop your nose up at us and you know pull right to us and then right before you hit us push so you don't hit us and that was the brief and i said well i'm not doing that that's insane first of all if i'm doing this low altitude scene i
00:36:41
need to be solely focused on that and i don't want to have to find you guys on the ingress at a low altitude to locate the helicopter is i said let's get that scene the way we want it just slow out through and then we'll film it again or
00:36:53
when i'm not i'm i'm higher i'm you know 30 40 50 feet something where i can actually have my skin look for the helicopter and still be down low and um and i'm not going to just pull up into
00:37:05
the last second push to not hit you they didn't understand the capabilities of the aircraft that it pulls better than it pushes and at a high speed the turn radius is really really wide and so we did it a few times and they
00:37:17
said no no keep your nose on us longer longer longer and then you know i knew i was gonna just wipe out everybody doing what they were doing so i said i'm i'm good let's go back and let's land at fallon and let's talk about this because what we're trying to do is not gonna work
00:37:30
and i remember them being quite frustrated and the guy who was sort of the head of that filming group said you're the first person that's ever told me no and he was polite but sort of forceful about it and i said well you know i'm
00:37:43
doing this for all of our benefit i don't i think what you're asking the airplane can't do and at one point i pushed so hard that all of the stuff in the airplane there's so much negativity my helmet bag went to the back seat the stuff in the back seat came forward it
00:37:54
was uh it was a hot mess in that airplane for a second and i was just trying to do what they what they were asking me to do and it just wasn't possible so what we ended up doing was moving the helicopter higher which meant they had to take out a person or two from the
00:38:06
helo to get better performance and i went slower which gave me a better turning radius and um and that changed everything and then i felt like i had a lot of controlling aircraft to the point where i was putting my jet exhaust across them to the point where they were
00:38:19
then getting uncomfortable so we were able to um i guess i don't say meet in the middle but get to the point where we got the shot they were looking for just by changing the parameters for what we were doing
00:38:32
awesome so we'll wrap it up uh here real soon uh question for you did you ever have a chance to interact with tom cruise at all uh during your time what's that a lot um we um he was intent on flying with the same person who filmed
00:38:45
that low altitude scene so we hopped in together and flew um basically that scene again so we'd have video in the back seat and then we ended up we had a good time flying together and so we and i fly a bear and
00:38:56
i own a baron here where we live and so he had started off flying a baron in europe when he was a young actor and doing a lot of stuff in europe so we had a lot of fun chats about the different airplanes we had flown and so we flew together for basically
00:39:09
all day every day that week and did a lot of the scenes through the canyons that is a pretty fun part of the movie and then film the final scenes for the movie out of the water west to la and yeah we flew together a lot and i have to tell you well he was great to
00:39:22
fly with you know i noticed this as blue angel 7 during the my vip flying time is that i could fly with someone who is a big name actor athlete you name it and then the next day i'd fly with a 65 year old female guidance
00:39:34
counselor and i would in a lot of cases have more fun with the 65 year old guidance counselor because she really enjoyed flying and did well with the g or the um maneuvers whereas maybe a famous actor athlete just didn't do well
00:39:46
and it wasn't very much fun and so we would go home early or they weren't feeling well or they didn't enjoy it and so it becomes you like flying with people who like flying not people that are famous um and
00:39:58
tom was both of those he's famous but uh he really was strong in the jet and did well and we went through i mean we're at low altitude and ag terms over and over again and he wanted it to be more and
00:40:10
more aggressive everything we did he just wanted it faster lower um higher g the whole time so he was he's a stud in the airplane did really well we had a day where we briefed at 6am and
00:40:21
basically flew all day together until about 9 00 p.m and we were coming back that night i said um you know what are you doing next he goes well i'm flying down to l.a with the producer and director and then i'm flying to see my family in florida i
00:40:33
said are you just going to rack out and sleep the whole time you said no man you've done all the flying today i get to fly tonight and every he was a blue collar pilot's not the right term but he loves to fly and he's not he's not ashamed of
00:40:46
working hard he's incredibly um hard-working individual and and it was telling to me that he was willing to fly all night because he had to sit there and let me fly all day
00:40:58
that's great well i think that's a good note to wrap it up on uh walleye thank you so much for taking time and sharing some insight into your career as well as the making a top gun i think people are really going to enjoy this discussion
00:41:10
and and thanks again i hope so too thank you you
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