Looks like Top Gun 2 is doing it right: no CGI planes

I had high expectations when I saw Joseph Kosinski was directing, but I was afraid it may rely on cgi since many of his previous movies have used it pretty heavily (it looked great in both Tron legacy and Oblivion, but used it nonetheless), but new reports and a recent article on the films release date have my hopes up.

From the aviationist website: LINK

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Two Super Hornets Buzz NAS Fallon Control Tower Allegedly For The Filming of “Top Gun” Sequel

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Many of our readers probably remember the iconic Top Gun fly-by scene when Maverick and Goose’s F-14, with fully swept wings at 68 degrees, buzz the Tower at Miramar on their way back from their dogfight with Jester. Well, that scene has become so famous that “Top Gun: Maverick”, the sequel to the Tony Scott’s original movie, will probably feature a similar scene.

Two Super Hornets were filmed flying close to a control tower at NAS Fallon, in western Nevada near Reno, recently. According to our friend Kyle Fleming, the flyby was required to film the iconic scene for Top Gun 2, that will be released in less than one year, on June 26, 2020. NAS Fallon is the home to the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center (NAWDC, pronounced NAW-DIK) whose mission is two-fold: to host the carrier air wings (CVWs, also called CAGs – carrier air groups) during their work-ups before deployment, and teach advanced combat warfare to selected pilots nby means of well-known courses including “Topgun”.

Earlier this year we published the photos of a second, previously unseen, single-seat U.S. Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet painted in the special black, light blue and gray color scheme, shot at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia on the U.S. east coast on Tuesday, May 14, 2019. The single-seat F/A-18E was seen in addition to the two-seat F/A-18F previously photographed and featured in Hollywood entertainment media which also has three “kill” markings (the silhouettes seem to be those of three F-5s aka MiG-28s….) and wears the pilot name, “Capt. Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell”, the character played by Tom Cruise in both the original 1986 Top Gun and reappearing in the upcoming sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick”, under the canopy.

Interestingly, the flyby at NAS Fallon was carried out by an F/A-18E and an F/A-18F but the screenshots prove that neither one had the movie color scheme mentioned above raising several questions: was it a rehearsal pass; will the new “buzz the tower” scene feature two “standard” Super Hornets and not the special colored ones? Or, was the flyby of the two “Rhinos” (as the Super Hornet is dubbed in the fighter pilots community) something completely unrelated to the movie? Sooner or later, we will find it out.

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A June 2020 release date was also just recently given a few weeks ago. The film was set to come out this week originally, but apparently complicated aerial stunts pushed back the release date to next summer.

By the sound of it, U.S. Navy is cooperating and their ain't gonna be no damn computer planes. Thank goodness. Also, the cast looks incredible. Finally, a sequel that is being done right.


On an unrelated note, it's interesting that they were filming in both Virginia and NAS Fallon (the actual home of Top Gun school for years now), but seems like they are keeping San Diego as the main setting from past photos.