Aircraft guru's...

slim and none, i think the one he sat in is sitting at Space Camp in Huntsville Alabama.

 

Possible, but maybe unlikely. Semenatics - Cruise never "flew" any F14.

All F14's are 100 series. There may have been some stock footage of 104 spliced into the movie, like some of the formation flying or carrier launches.

Most of the scenes were really models, so the model may have the same "bunu" (bulkhead number) as a real F14. There were very few scenes of real planes, believe it or not. Though I believe Cruise did get an incentive ride in a real F14. "Just don't touch any of the buttons, Tom."

 

There are also 200 series F-14's. Remember most of the time there are, or were 2 squadrons deployed on the boat. Nowadays they might have changed the sq's by also putting some F-18E's, to deploy along with the F-14's. The # of F-14's in the Sq may have also been changed from the Cold War era.


The only way to know; is to look at the USN serial # on the F-14 just below the elevator. An example of the number would be 161512 or 159818. Those are the only #'s that always stay with the airplane.

 

If I remember correctly a teacher of mine in tenth grade told us an old student of his (like from the early 80's) was a fighter pilot and actually did the flying and fighting scenes for Top Gun. I vaguely remember a teacher saying this.

 

From what I understand, the US Navy was very against helping the producers/directors of Top Gun. I believe that all that the Navy gave them were two "dummy" test range missiles. I have watched several interviews( there might even be one on the dvd, I can't remember) where the directors said that they did all the flying stuff with models, ranging from 1/86 up to I think 1/8 scale(pretty big model!!). It may be a plane that was used in stocck footage that may have been used, however I would say it't the same number, but not the same plane.

Craig

 

Pretty sure Cruise flew an A model (needed burner on takeoff)

 

one of my neighbors when i lived in La jolla california was an instructor at Miramar. not really realted but it was pretty cool.

 

The plane in the picture appears to be an F-14 D, since the under-nose cluster appears to include both the TV camera and an IR sensor, the retractable canard in the leading edge of the wing glove has been deleted, and the ejection seats are the newer NACES II system rather than the old Martin-Baker Back Breaker. Every air wing up until 1996 had 2 Tomcat squadrons, with either a modex and codex of 1XX or 2XX, so 104 was common. From the looks of the helmets the stick and RIO are wearing, the helmets are the newer, low drag jobs and appear to be done in the colors of VF-2 Bounty Hunters, which, while they were partnered up with VF-1 Wolfpack, had 2XX modex and codex, but after VF-1 was decommissioned in '94, left VF-2 to take the 1XX modex and codex. The block numbers are under the horizontal stab, at the end of the Navy Bureau number for the airframe, to denote hte construction block of airframes that the aircraft was built in.

 

Angelo has a lot of good facts and corrections to my post. I found a good website that may offer some more info.

http://home.att.net/~jbaugher/navyserials.html

And a webpage with the modex numbers and tailcodes:

http://www.topedge.com/alley/text/cvws/airwings.htm