Last week the staff at Naval Air Station Fallon hosted a media day in advance of the long-awaited release of the new TOPGUN movie, “TOPGUN: Maverick” starring Tom Cruise.
Local print media crews, along with television station crews from Reno and Sacramento were inside the TOPGUN schoolhouse where they met with CMDR Michael Patterson and his current pilot/teaching staff. Reporters also had the opportunity to shoot B-roll video of the static displays and on the flight line as the current class of TOPGUN pilots suited up for their training sortie.
LT Nikkol Rajkovacz is one of the first female aircrew who is a TOPGUN instructor. She is a Weapons Systems Operator who flew in the adversary course before being invited back as an instructor. As a WSO or “Wizzo,” she flies in the back seat of a F/A-18F Super Hornet, and is responsible for, as she says, “communications, weapons, assisting in navigations, just making the aircraft more lethal.” Her job is to “train the weapons school aircrew with the ability to defeat any adversary at any time.” She trains the trainer.
Rajkovacz was part of filming the scenes in the movie shot over the water, flying out of NAS Lemoore in southern California. She didn’t make the cut into the movie, but said, seeing the aviation footage was incredible. “It is an accurate representation of what it’s like to be in a jet and unlike anything any viewer has seen before.”
Patterson is in Fallon on his second tour, having been stationed here in 2008. He explained that TOPGUN was born out of the failures in Vietnam where too many Americans were dying in air combat.
LT Graham Stapleton said the unacceptable combat losses in Vietnam led CAPT Frank Ault to “task a couple of Lieutenants to figure out how to fix the deficiencies.” He said they figured out how to train the aircrews to win in combat and going back to Vietnam the kill/loss ratio went from 2-1 to 12-1. “That was an immediate force multiplier,” said Stapleton.
The school was founded in 1969 to top that and 53 years later the mission remains the same – to “make sure American aircrew are trained to win in combat,” said Patterson.
He said that the school teaches and develops advanced tactics to the students who then go back to their duty stations as experts and become teachers themselves, teaching the rest of the fleet. Answering a television reporter, Patterson defined “advanced tactics” by explaining, “I think of it as if you’re the offensive coordinator of a football team coming up with plays to beat the best defense in the league, that’s advanced tactics.”
The need for a center of excellence is why there is a TOPGUN he said. “As part of the Naval Advanced Warfare Development Center, day in and day out we teach naval aviators how to win. They spend three years here coming up with those tactics and then teaching them. I wouldn’t want to face them,” he said in response to a reporter asking how good they are.
In terms of the movie, Patterson said he hopes it does the same thing the first TOPGUN movie did, “share with the American public a glimpse of naval aviation and the skills and bravery of our young men and women who serve. Our country is in good hands.”
As the home of TOPGUN, Patterson said the training opportunities here cannot be replicated anywhere else. “There wouldn’t be a TOPGUN without Fallon,” he said.
Stapleton said each TOPGUN class is 13R weeks long and consists of a rigorous prep course that is required before the pilots even get to Fallon. There is an application process to be accepted, “they have to be good in the airplane and well respected by their peers and the senior leaders. Each class has funding and space for nine F-18 crews, either one or two seaters as well as three F-35 crews at one time, making 12 crews and roughly 35 students.
He said the movie shows off the Fallon ranges and the overland training environment, but it is “a bummer they don’t show how welcoming this community has been to us, how they truly embrace us. This community and the State of Nevada have been nothing but welcoming to the TOPGUN schoolhouse. It is cool to see the support of TOPGUN and the Navy in general, they’ve welcomed us with open arms. I absolutely love being here.”
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