Top Gun: The Navy's Fighter Weapons School
Top Gun: The Navy's Fighter Weapons School
Presidio Press | 1987 | ISBN: 0891412611 | English | 140 pages | PDF | 92.2 MB
Civilian photographer George Hall takes you on a guided tour of USN Fighter Weapons School (AKA "Top Gun"), the Navy's post-grad school for fighter pilots. In Top Gun, the top pilots from fighter squadrons thruought the fleet come, not to compete against each other as depicted in the movie, but to learn from each other and to bring their new found expertise back to their units. Rather than flying against each other (they do plenty of that while at sea) they spar against "agressor units" trained adversary pilots steeped in pseudo-communist bombast and flying old but mrderously agile and hard-to-spot jets like the A-4 Skywhak and the F-5 Tiger II. (The F-16N, though slated to equip agressor units hadn't begun to enter service by the time the book was published.) Victory against these agressors, despite the age of their aircraft, is impossible - at the outset. But Top Gun is also about education, and the agressors work their charges well, until the tide of battle begins to turn, and the students begin besting their teachers.