“While the Navy’s graduate-level fighter pilot training program was a Big Thing in 1986, it was anything but that when it was created in 1969.”

By Dwight Jon Zimmerman

WHEN THE BLOCKBUSTER Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise, debuted in 1986, it hit audiences with all the power of an F-14 Tomcat on full afterburner.

The movie put the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School, the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program (SFTI) as it’s known now, squarely in the public eye and enormously boosted its reputation. In some parts of the country, young men exiting theatres found themselves coming face-to-face with Navy recruiting kiosks, ready to sign up anyone who wanted to be the next Maverick or Iceman. And sign up they did in record numbers. Only when they arrived at Navy bases for pilot training did the young men (at the time only men could be combat pilots) discover how different the Hollywood movie was from the real thing.

But, while the Navy’s graduate-level fighter pilot training program was the Big Thing in 1986, it was anything but that when it was created in 1969. Here’s the story.

The Navy Didn’t Want Topgun

The Navy didn’t create what would become Topgun because it wanted it; it created Topgun because it desperately needed it. During the Vietnam War, American pilots were getting shot down in unprecedented numbers by North Vietnamese aviators flying obsolete jet fighters and using outmoded World War Two tactics. Unless the brass could turn things around fast, the skies over Southeast Asia would need to be declared off limits. In fact, the Navy did suspend air operations over North Vietnam temporarily in 1968 to give stateside command time to find the answer – a humiliating turn of events for the most powerful naval air force in the world.

Before Topgun, Too Many Navy Pilots Were Being Shot Down Over Vietnam

In World War Two, a golden age of air combat, the kill ratio for U.S. Navy pilots was 14:1, meaning that for every 14 enemy planes shot down, the Navy lost one. In the Korean War, that ratio was 12:1. During Vietnam, the ratio had fallen to a shocking 2.5:1. What happened? Did Navy pilots suddenly forget how to fight? Though nobody in the Navy’s high command wanted to believe those numbers, there was no denying them. Naval aviation was facing the greatest threat to its existence since 1947 when the U.S. Air Force tried to eliminate the Navy’s air arm and become the nation’s sole air force. An answer had to be found, and fast.

A Real-life ‘Maverick’ Pinpointed the Problem

In July 1968 the Navy’s boss, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer, charged Captain Frank Ault to do a study to find out why and how a supposedly third-rate air force could go toe-to-toe with some of the best-trained fighter pilots in the world and blast them out of the sky. Ault had a reputation for bluntness, which at times bordered on outright insubordination. Despite this, he was given broad authority to investigate every nook and cranny of naval air operations. He and his team used it, seeking answers to a series of fundamental questions: Is the navy getting the best planes, air-to-air missiles and weapons systems possible and are shipboard crews and pilots actually trained to do their jobs? According to Ault’s findings, the short answer to these questions was a resounding “hell, no.” On Jan. 1, 1969, he gave Admiral Moorer what would become known as the Ault Report. It pulled no punches. In fact, the document knocked quite a few admirals’ noses out of joint. His report chapter-and-versed a whopping 242 failings, large and small, in shipboard and air operations that explained in detail what and why Navy pilots were failing in air combat over North Vietnam. The biggest culprit of all: the Navy’s new interceptor air combat doctrine. Pilots would need to be retrained, and fast.

The Navy Had Forgotten How to Dogfight

After the Korean War, the Navy leadership identified Soviet bombers carrying tactical nuclear bombs and missiles as the primary threat to fleet and country. Instead of close-in dogfights between fast jets, fighters would now become interceptors, engaging enemy bombers “beyond visual range” (BVR). Using long-range Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles, American crews would shoot the bombers down before the targets even realized they were under attack. The aircraft carrying out this new combat doctrine was the McDonnell F-4 Phantom II. In fact, when it became operational in 1960, Navy leadership proclaimed, “aerial dogfighting is dead!” Someone forgot to tell that to the North Vietnamese pilots.

America’s Jets Were Too Advanced

The F-4 Phantom II was the most sophisticated warplane to date. Yet its electronics suite was so complex that it needed its own operator, a radar intercept officer (RIO), to handle the combat systems while the pilot focused on flying the aircraft. Theoretically that should have worked. The reason it didn’t was the new interceptor doctrine that went with it. Phantom crews were trained to stage BVR attacks on slow, straight and level flying bombers. As such, Phantom cockpits were configured with a suite of controls and instruments placed in locations where the pilot had to look down to find. But instead of bombers, Phantom pilots over North Vietnam found themselves engaging maneuverable MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighters skilled in dogfighting tactics. Now Navy pilots had to look up and keep an eye on a nimble enemy fighter at a time when they needed to look down to fly their interceptor. The result, a kill ratio of 2.5:1.

Topgun Started on a Shoestring

The Ault Report was bitter medicine. A lot of admirals had invested their careers in the interceptor doctrine and felt threatened by its findings, one of which recommended the establishment of a special school to train naval fliers in the lost art of air-to-air combat. While they couldn’t stop the plan, they also wouldn’t go out of their way to support it. And, they’d be circulating like vultures ready to kill the program, to be based in Naval Air Station Miramar in Southern California, as soon as they saw an opening. It was an opening Topgun’s first commander, Lt. Commander Daniel Pedersen was determined not to give them.

The School’s First Commander Initially Didn’t Want the Job

Initially, Pedersen refused the command. He was already slated to be VF-121’s tactics commander, a plum job, and wanted to have nothing to do with the creation of a new combat tactics school that was surrounded by so many question marks. Worse, the program had no budget to speak of, no facilities, no staff and, worst of all, no planes. All-in-all this big shiny idea had all the makings of a surefire career killer. Ironically, it was this exact cornucopia of problems that eventually led Petersen to change his mind. He had always loved overcoming challenges, and this one had them in spades. What he liked most was the fact that he would have a free hand in both running the new school and in developing new tactics. He took the job and hit the ground running. It would take all his skill to beg, borrow, and steal everything from pencils to fighters. But he had to work fast, classes were scheduled to start in less than two months.

Topgun’s First Instructors Rewrote All the Rules

Using a commandeered trailer as office and classroom, Pedersen assembled a team of eight pilot and RIO instructors, tossed out the existing training manual and with the Ault Report in hand they “reinvented the wheel”—distilling the report’s findings into a workable training program. They personally tested their new tactics, pushing their “borrowed” Phantoms’ aerodynamic envelop far beyond the manufacturer’s recommended limits. They saw classified information about the flight characteristics of their adversaries, the MiG-17 and MiG-21. They created a new doctrine that turned the Phantom interceptor into a dogfighter—emphasizing its strengths and exploiting the weaknesses of the MiGs. They were ready when the first class arrived for the four-week course in March 1969. When that first class graduated and went into action, Petersen and his instructors had one last question that could only be answered in combat: Would Topgun actually work? It would take a year before they knew the answer.

They Were Proven Right

On March 28, 1970, pilot Lieutenant Jerry Beaulier and RIO Lt. (j.g.) Steve Barkley of VF-142, the “Ghostriders,” were wingmen in a two-plane combat air patrol (CAP) guarding the carrier USS Constellation off the coast of North Vietnam when they received word of a pair of MiG-21s 87 miles away. The CAP was released to intercept. Topgun doctrine emphasized that the person who saw the enemy first got first crack, regardless of rank. Beaulieu did, and the chase was on. Despite the enemy pilot’s violent maneuvers and skillful flying, thanks to his Topgun training, Beaulier was able to hang with him. When he saw his chance, he took it. Two Sidewinder air-to-air missile shots later, the MiG-21 was falling to earth in flames (the other had immediately bugged out upon being attacked). Beaulier and Barkley returned to the Constellation and a hero’s welcome. And in Miramar the cheers were even louder. Topgun had proven itself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dwight Jon Zimmerman is the author of the forthcoming book Top Gun: 50 Years of Naval Air Superiority. A best-selling and award-winning writer, radio show host, producer and the president of the Military Writers Society of America, Zimmerman has authored the text for several graphic novels, including the acclaimed The Hammer and the Anvil, a dual biography of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. His other titles include The Vietnam War: A Graphic History and Uncommon Valor: The Medal of Honor and the Six Warriors Who Earned It in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is also the co-author, with Bill O’Reilly, of the New York Times number-one bestseller Lincoln’s Last Days.