The REAL 'Top Gun: Maverick' F-18 Pilot | He Flew as Maverick During Filming | Frank Weisser

What we did on that film was very dynamic and

real

ly his request was as dynamic as possible, you know, as fast, as aggressive as possible and that was very much Tom's perspective. The good thing about Tom personally is that, since he is a

pilot

. and because he's in it himself, I felt like instead of being a passenger, he was more of a crew member. You have about 3 in the Great, make no mistake, Jacob will prevail. I read Lords of Disciplina, which is a book by Pat Conroy specifically about The Citadel, although it didn't have a name and it talked about a military school experience and that seemed exciting in the challenge and more specifically, I wanted to be an AV label and so So, I was trying to find the logical way. do that, so something had piqued my interest in seals when I was very young, 11 or 12, long before they became popular after 9/11, of course, and then I found the way to do it through of a service academy.

I like the right way to do it and certainly the most cost-effective way, but I went to the Naval Academy specifically to do that. How did academia change you during those four years and prepare you for the career that followed? Yeah, great question, they say about the Naval Academy it's a great place to be, but it's not always a good place to be because it's difficult, it's a very different experience and I think for me it was the first opportunity to

real

ly experience the perspective and a change in perspective because of military service and what I mean by that is that all my friends went to traditional universities and we all left.

We had a close-knit group of friends from high school and we all went our separate ways, but I found myself at a military academy with 5 in the morning and long days and a very atypical college approach and it prepared me in that sense to be in a career. which was very different than what a normal civilian of my contemporaries would have been doing and I now call it the gift of perspective because I am very grateful to have seen something different because now in life it really makes everything a little easier when you you encounter normal challenges.

Now, after the launch, you went to Pensacola, right. I did, yes, so I asked to go to Seals. the Navy, like any service you know, needs the Navy to rise above everyone's personal desires, uh, there's no doubt that my strengths and weaknesses are better aligned with flying than seals, um, and you also know what a blessing that was unknown at the time is that you can serve much longer in a truly operational environment, so as a

pilot

, even when you're 05 40 50, in some cases you can still be very active as a pilot, you know, carrying the fight the enemy so that It was kind of an unexpected blessing for us to be able to continue serving in that capacity for years.

What were you flying initially? So in flight school we started with the T-34, which has now been phased out and that's their single-engine turboprop. two-seat plane your instructor usually sits in the back. I selected Jets and was happy I did so I moved up to the t2 which was a very old type of Cold War era twin engine jet that wasn't very advanced in terms of avionics or capabilities but was perfect for learning to flying faster and doing some of the basic airplane stuff and then we transitioned to the T45, which was a more advanced training airplane.

I did it for a year. I actually trained him for a year and a half after that, before I started the F-18, but right away for me it was the Virginia Beach F-18 Charlie's Single Seed F-18s, which at the time was really the only single seed plane you could be on. Right when the Super Hornet came into operation and then I

flew

mostly what we would call legacies, but F-18s like B C and D for the next 20 years, when was your first deployment to the Iraq theater? 2005 and, therefore, what type of missions were they? flying um it was mostly supervised we would call it um uh I guess for lack of term bear we're on station and ready to go and uh we had very few pre-planned attacks back then um but you were there in case someone came under fire you know what we had a lot of fighters flying overhead at that time.

Air Force fighters that were stationed there. Marine Corps fighters that were stationed there. We would keep our carrier right in the Persian Gulf, in the northernmost section, it still had about an hour of transit there. goes in there, but you know, Cass is the mission there in most places that have close air support, so we were up for that and we would have cases where there might be a ground unit that knows what that one is doing. day or that night as a high risk level and then they would call for air support and we were going to do it and then there would be cases where another group of people would be under fire and then we can deploy quickly because we are already in the air and you can cover 50 or 100 miles in minutes and that was typically the mission for Iraq back then, any particularly memorable engagement, gosh, I had a lot, there's a fog of war that goes on there of course, and some of the people who In some cases, if not They have eyes, it's hard to really know who the enemy is, and back then, I mean, when you're at 20,000 feet, our capabilities were kind of limited, maybe we would have one.

A forward facing infrared radar that would essentially be a high speed video camera that would look at the ground and we didn't always have two in our aircraft section so it was usually at 15 20,000 feet with binoculars looking. during the day and night trying to determine who is friend and who is foe and then correlating what they are telling us on the radios with what we were seeing and it is really challenging and there were some cases where we were authorized to employ people who They definitely weren't. enemies, whether they were farmers or children, or any number of various scenarios where that is the benefit of having a human being in that plane and drone.

War for sure is in the future and I understand that, but to the extent that I could ever defend Human Pilots still in airplanes, that is the case because you really know that this exists, since there are spots in the hair on the back of your neck when you just you know something is not right and therefore instead of employing and having any kind of civilian casualties. We were the last person in that process to say yes or no and then we were the ones who would hire, so there are several cases like that and there were others where you can hear the voice of the people we are talking to. and in many cases it's the jtac, it's the terminal air controller on the ground who, in some cases, as a pilot, the Marine Corps definitely uses their own pilots for a year or two between their ground landing flying jobs. units and they understand what we're going through, they understand that we're on a plane at night, there's not a lot of room for anything, we have charts that we've opened, we're trying to look at it on an iPad and correlate it with our systems and then they get it and they understand why we wouldn't be willing to quit or go to work either way, but when you hear stress in their voice because it's a pretty calm and collected group, you know you need to do it and So one of the things that we really adopted was this elevated response where , if we knew our people were under fire, we immediately began the show of force and that meant the lowest we could safely go above where we knew the enemy.

This is because generally having an F-18 or any type of fighter on you in the Dark Knight will scare the hell out of anyone, good or bad, and usually the enemy, which is followed by them dying when they hear a noise. That's right, so what I would do for our people is I would give them time if they just had a plane down, tearing it up in full afterburner, give them a few seconds to recover and maybe cover the seats that kind of thing and then we could go through this process where we set the station on fire, you know, through small bullets instead of massive bombs and we elevated that response to keep our guys safe, so we did a lot and phenomenally.

Well, let's talk about another opportunity you had shortly after. your service in the wars and that was in 2007 you joined the famous Blue Angels how did you get that opportunity? It's something you could pursue or were asked to pursue. How did that come about? Yes, it's an interesting question, so we have to apply. You asked to be considered at the beginning, and to me, you have a variety of options when you finish your first few years flying F-18s, in my case, and in order for you to move up to being a test pilot, you can go to Top Gun. you can be a flight instructor, those are traditional routes and they are all great for their own reasons.

The Blue Angels are kind of a unique organization that they usually choose two or three pilots a year to join. and for me it really worked with my career schedule because I had been a flight instructor before joining my fleet squadron, but it seemed like something interesting and different. I love naval aviation. I loved serving in the military. I wanted to share, flying sounded exciting, but it wasn't necessarily just flying, which I think is most people's perspective, which is just guys who want to destroy the Jets and be some kind of cowboys. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't like that at All That, when I met the pilots who were flying when I joined, they were the most professional group of aviators I had ever worked with and they really cared a lot about what they were doing and also , they cared a lot about inspiring the future. and then over the years there, I

flew

with 11 different Blue Angel teams during my time in the military.

You hear these stories of people who you knew were service members or incredible pilots or whatever and they had joined the military because of the Blue Angels and it gives you this renewed sense of this job, it doesn't matter, you're not taking the fight to the enemy for sure, but you were definitely contributing indirectly to the cause because you are signing the future of our fighters and it is not just the pilots, it is everyone, we bring an air show to a Kansas in the middle of nowhere that has no presence of naval aviation and little kids get inspired and end up changing the direction of their lives because of it, it's great, so you.

You're an ambassador, you are, yes, and the Air Force Team that the Thunderbirds wear, I think they call themselves The Ambassadors in Blue, but we definitely wanted to inspire and motivate and show the pride and professionalism of our Corps. Navy Marines and we can. We don't take everyone from all of these ancient cities to an aircraft carrier, but we can take a small portion of that to them and that's what we're trying to do now, you mentioned that you flew with several different teams, different personnel over the years. The Blue Angels take some getting used to, given the precision maneuvers, how easy or difficult it is to synchronize with a new group of pilots.

That's a great question. What we do really well at the Blues is we give ourselves time. for time to train and we are given the assets and resources and we were allowed so many training sorties because the risk level is high, you are flying low over the ground, you are flying close to other aircraft that you are flying and you talk about proximity people normally when you do aerobatics they are over four thousand feet or in our case 10 20 30 000 feet and now here we are doing it at five feet or 20 feet and there is a crowd 1200 feet away, not just one crew. a hundred thousand people, so the margin for error is almost non-existent, you know, and what we would do is we would train together hundreds of flights with exactly the same people before we would be allowed to perform in front of a crowd. and then we would be inspected and certified by both the Navy and the FAA, so each team is a little different, pilot skill levels vary, um, brief and informative techniques vary, personalities vary, but what What I found was that overall it's all pretty much the same, you know, slip in liars here and there, but everyone is motivated, everyone is trying to fly well and do well and support the mission, so, in retrospect, it was fun to watch.

Go back and remember how the team was slightly different. but overall, there wasn't a single team that I thought was a terrible team or necessarily a team that was a great team, they were all just exceptional groups, so you're like the father of several children, you don't have a favorite I don't have a favorite no, no, I love them anyway. Have you ever had any close calls on a show? Yeah, um, I felt like I used my nine lives about nine times, probably, but that's nature. of the business and it's not just the Blue Angels, it's the F-18s in general and they fly from aircraft carriers when everything starts to degrade like I said and it always seems to happen tonight and bad weather, you know, when things start to go wrong , but that's why, well, why don't they pay us a lot of money, you know, but that's why we work very hard to be good at what we do, because certainly, ifYou're on a plane, things go wrong, now is not the time to do it.

You lose your cool, it's more important than ever that you stay calm and know that it's only you who can take on this problem and solve it, but that's why we are well trained and well prepared and I haven't had any of that. I thought this was it, but I've been pretty focused on what was happening at the time and if you've been to the theater recently you'll know that one of the biggest box office hits has been Maverick, probably the first big Blockbuster after everyone felt comfortable. back to theaters and if you were impressed with what Matt Fabric was able to do in that movie, you have Frank to thank because he was the actual pilot while Tom Cruise was in the backseat and it was filmed there, so how?

Did you receive this task in the first place? Excellent questions, the Navy worked very, very hard to include many pilots. I piloted a few specific scenes that I'll talk about, but one of the things I love about how they did it. Did they find junior officers to prove to the whole world that these are not veteran pilots with 20 years and 30 years of experience? These are our younger guys and they can do these kinds of things, and they also tried to find the right experts in each field. of flight that would align well with the movie, for example in the dogfight scenes in the movie that, like you said, were actually flown, everything you see on camera there was actually a plane filmed and it was the Top instructors Gun the ones who flew some of those dog trust scenes when they left the aircraft carrier was the carrier landing officer the guy who teaches new students how to land how to land on the plane crew he was flying those scenes there were a couple of scenes that they needed an airplane that I would call an extremely low altitude, something far above where we would normally fly an airplane traditionally in the Navy, going down to 500 feet above the ground is as low as possible and then once you're proficient, you've done it. . a few times then you go down to 200 feet, but at that altitude we talk about mission cross check times, so you can look inside for a second and then go back outside, that is, if you want to check your weapons systems.

If you want to check your navigation systems but are solely focused on being outside because of terrain hazards or whatever the obstacles or obstructions are to the film, they want a plane at 20 or 30 feet if that's as low as we can reasonably get. we go and we just don't do that and there's definitely a low appetite for that level of risk so someone other than me who is involved in this process offered that the Blue Angels do that pretty routinely so could we maybe Maybe include a Blue Angel to do some of these scenes. Unfortunately, the Blue Angels fly every weekend, 300 days a year, traveling and there is no way to easily alienate one of the six pilots and specifically one of the two or three that do that kind of thing.

In the way of

filming

, I was still linked to Blue Angels preparing our new plane through some demo testing and regression I was doing, so it was a pretty easy connection to make, so I was aligned with the film for these scenes and left. Finally we filmed probably six or eight separate weeks where we did the takeoff that starts the movie, um, we'd call it a low transition, but Tom Cruise is on a dark star, you know, a simulated plane 10 and some kind of dust, the Admiral and rips the roof off a building and what you see is exactly what happened and it turns out that, in fact, if you were to see the behind the scenes footage from further back, the entire set was essentially decimated, in fact, they CG'd my Angel Blue F- 18 Into the Dark Star because it had to be that way, but what you saw is exactly what happened.

We do that maneuver every day on the Blue Angels, that's takeoff maneuver number six on the Blue Angel, so it was easy. I have done. I've done it thousands of times, so I knew I could do it safely and meet a whole group of people and not put anyone at risk unless you really made that plan work well. It's funny, we did it faster, we practiced the day before and Faster is in some cases worse and now that the movie is out we can show some of the behind the scenes stuff. We had a series of scenes with planes going five or six hundred miles an hour at a really low altitude, just scraping that building and it didn't have the desired effect, but if you did it at 20 feet and then went up right when you got over the top, the way which directs the nozzles and Jet exhaust to the ground has a very destructive effect on the set, so what we found By the way, I know that the F-18, like any vehicle, has an optimized turning radius at certain speeds, so that there is definitely a speed band for the Hornet that gives it the best turning radius and, you know, that turn and So we found that if we were at 20 feet and at a speed less than 400 knots, for example, it had quite an impact devastating on set and that's what we ultimately chose because it was, I mean, like what you saw in the movie, it literally ripped the roof off the building and would have been separated by a great distance.

There was a duct running through it and the building had a double there for, you know, visual effect and the director of that movie thought he had You know, he almost killed the whole crew because of what he did. Wow, so when I saw it after landing 20 minutes later, everyone was still coming out of it. You know, emotionally high from what had happened. Well, you mentioned the low altitude and me. I'm not going to give away the plot because the movie is still pretty new in case anyone hasn't seen it, but being at low altitude was instrumental to the plot towards the end of the movie, but there's also a point where there's a very pronounced sudden change. climb with a lot of g forces where you did too.

I filmed, so there's a scene that you'll see where the plane explodes. You know, Tom will borrow a plane to run this Canyon tour at a certain time to prove that he can. be done and that was him with me on the plane if you're looking if you see Tom's face of course that's Tom he's in the back seat with me and if you're looking forward you see anything shot over the shoulder we had cameras that were on both sides that would be in that particular scene, my head from behind, they went to Great Links to make sure it was legit because there are definitely people who will try to find inaccuracies in movies, so they went to Great Links to make me look at Tom from behind and we flew him together over and over again and it was very much a dynamic part of that movie, both flying him and then seeing him, uh, and then there was a scene that we were appearing in where he came down over the desert, it's a high desert in Fallon Nevada, where topkin is um, but we're a pole six seven eight G directly towards the vertical and there's even a scene where you see the plane ascending directly towards the camera, which we actually filmed.

Also, there was a helicopter that was right above it and we literally got close to the helicopter until the last second and avoided the Hilo, but we got an amazing shot for the movie, oh that's phenomenal. Now Tom Cruise is well known for doing many of his own stunts, so how did he manage to be in the back seat? Thomas, the champion, actually, and you know, fortunately, it was my time in the blues. I gave hundreds of guest rides. My first year in the Blue Angels I was the VIP pilot, so I flew. actors, athletes, high school teachers, counselors, a wide variety of people, so you quickly learn that you could be an NFL MVP and you're not very good on the plane, but you could be a 60-year-old counselor and be a stud absolute. and uh, and you can never get it right enough, so it's interesting to me how some people do better than others.

Turns out Tom had both things right, so he was a very well-known actor known for his own stunts, but he's also very capable on the plane and the way they set it all up, if you're in the back seat, it was all cameras. and you had no forward visibility, just a small strip on either side of all these cameras, so I would have called it an absolute recipe for motion sickness, a perfect recipe because you can't see anything forward, so any ability to not You would get dizzy when looking at the Horizon and looking for a long time when flying with the people they were.

I'm not feeling good I'll just say look, we'll stop, we'll go straight and level, look ahead, watch The Horizon, your brain and your stomach will eventually get back in sync and they didn't have that and what we did in that movie. was very dynamic and really his request was as dynamic as possible, you know, as fast and aggressive as possible and that was very much Tom's perspective, the good thing about Tom personally is that, since he is a driver, he himself is involved in this. I felt like, rather than being a passenger, he was more of a crew member and that was an important aspect for me in some of the things we did as it was high risk so you know there was little leeway. mistake. a Blue Angel air show, to a certain extent you know we had, we were focused on our game and we rarely took passengers on the Blue Angels, but when we do, it's never during the air show, so essentially it was having Tom on the Jet with me for an air show, but since he flew a lot because he was good at it and it made it a lot safer in my opinion, how did the rest of the crew do, especially with the G's?

I saw that they liked his faces, yes, that's it. right, no, I think they did very well, actually, as I understand it, it was Tom's idea to put them through this process almost like a preparation program because when they filmed the original I don't know who flew, but the flights they did. If someone hadn't done well because they just weren't prepared for the extreme experience, then they started a 172 evaluation or a small civil general aviation airplane and moved on to smaller, more dynamic airplanes and then to a smaller jet, uh, the l- 39 and finally in the Hornet, so when they flew with us they had a large amount of air since their bodies were more used to it, they were more prepared, they understood the conversation and what was happening.

They knew when to talk and when to shut up and they were also their own directors, so they had their own cameras there and they had to manipulate the cameras during the course of the

filming

sessions, so just on the plane they're there literally producing, directing their own movie. , but for themselves, and if they didn't do it well, it was maybe a waste of 12 or 15,000 that maybe they would have to do it and couldn't. Always reshoot it however you want because they had limited days to shoot and the conditions had to be exactly the same and that's a really important aspect when you watch that movie you won't see any inconsistencies in that sense, but if we shot it again.

Several days, even the weather alone can change a lot clouds and sun angles and that kind of stuff, so they did a great job. How much collaboration is there between the studio and the Navy to make this happen? I guess there came a time when there were a lot of things, yes, until we got to the head of Naval Aviation, our three stars were very involved in the process and, fortunately, that was the case because it is a big risk that the Navy is assuming. for a movie, but from a recruiting perspective, I mean, not only will it bring us Navy pilots, but it will bring us, you know, Air Force pilots, British pilots and then all of our additional crew members who do that all this is possible.

The next 20 years I almost rejoined. I was retired for six months when the movie came out and it was incredible, so you get excited about what we've done, so I think they were willing to accept that level of risk because of the potential reward that they certainly got, um, but you know what. there is a Navy Captain whose only job was to simply manage the liaison between Paramount and the Navy and he did an incredible job. Were you surprised by the box office success it became? um, I was pleasantly surprised, I guess so. I didn't know what the plot was.

I hadn't asked any questions about where the movie was going and who the characters were and how it all intertwined and what happened, you know how they go back to the original and how they move it forward, the first one, of course, we joked about it a lot in the Marina, but it has a lot of inaccuracies, you know, it's a little cheesy at different points, that's why people love it, right, and I think we were all very aware of the fact that if we made this movie the way we wanted it, no one would go. , it's a documentary, it's not a movie, so it has to have that feeling that the drama has to be there, whether it exists every day. in our real life or not, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I thought they did an amazing job so hopefully it will have at least the same impact as the original so you're saying you never made an investment like that. in the original five feet fromWe, well, so we actually made that movie, if just for a moment, but if you watch the new top gun Maverick, there's a scene where Maverick rolls upside down on a rooster and then they start a dog fight. We went down to the deck and we filmed it, so I was in the inverted plane and the upright plane was a gentleman named pops who was the captain of Top Gun, the chameleon officer speaking at the time and we filmed that scene together and we were able to do It was because of the Blue Angels and the fact that he had flown the exact same maneuver thousands of times.

Incredible. You mentioned earlier the impact the Blue Angels have on Navy recruiting, and I think you just alluded to what the first Top Gun movie was. Is it too early to see what impact this is having or well, is there an immediate impact on the Blue Angels air shows, for example the number of people who attended the shows right after the film's release and then approached to the line of the crowd to speak? The pilots later with questions, hey, did this really happen? You can do this? People who were energized by what the movie had done, so that's how it was.

Absolutely immediate. I'm not online or connected to the recruiting centers enough to know what the impact has been, you know, six months later, but anecdotally I think it's going to be huge, I mean my kids, who you know, who followed me . My career, you know, as children of a Navy pilot, has always been moderately interested at best and in the movie, you know, everyone came out and said Dad, how come we don't want to do that now? ? So, they had never shown any interest. before, so I think it will have that impact on people everywhere and what's really cool for me is that I had some nights that are minimal in my mind, you know, long nights over Afghanistan and Iraq flying in very challenging scenarios and in In some cases, the people I flew with were my colleagues who were superior to me and in a couple of them I just clearly remember how calm, collected and professional they were on the plane and how grateful I was to fly with someone who was a such an incredible pilot and knowing that they joined the Navy and flew 20 or 25 years later because they saw the original Top Gun and it tells me that we will have the same impact that in 20 years there will be a really incredible Navy.

Marine Corps pilots flying over hostile areas because of that movie.