Tom Cruise Teases “Top Gun 2” Movie With An F/A-18F Super Hornet Photo

May 31, 2018 Military Aviation
David Cenciotti

Looks like Top Gun sequel may feature the Super Hornet instead of the F-35.

Tom Cruise has just teased the long-awaited Top Gun movie sequel (expected in July 2019) with an interesting photo posted on Twitter with the text “Feel the need” and #Day1. The image, that marks the beginning of filming and production work, shows U.S. Navy pilot Capt. Pete Mitchell, wearing the flight suit with a TOPGUN patch on his shoulder and what appears to be an F/A-18F Super Hornet in the background. This seems to suggest “Maverick” retains a pilot role (and possibly he’s still assigned to the U.S. Navy Naval Fighter Weapons School even though the patch may only mean he graduated there) and that he flies the Super Hornet and not an F-35C, the U.S. Navy’s most modern aircraft, as most had predicted.

Since the first movie was released back in the 1980s, TOPGUN has moved from Miramar to NAS Fallon, Nevada even though, according to our friends at Combat Aircraft  the trees in the shot suggest that the photo wasn’t taken at the base home of the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center, near Reno.

One thing worth noticing is the fact that “Mav” has his famous HGU-33 helmet in his hand even though that kind of old-fashioned helmet has long been replaced within the U.S. Navy and other air arms around the world by the more modern Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System or HGU-68/P helmets.

 

We will keep you updated as more details on Top Gun 2 emerge.

About David Cenciotti
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David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.

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5 Comments

  1. I’m not terribly surprised, the producers probably took one look at that fat little turkey called “F-35” and said “sorry, we can’t make this look cool, it’s just too lame”. And since it’s a movie about naval pilots, that only leaves the F-18.

  2. 30 years later, Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell would be a former naval aviator either retired and flying 737’s for Southwest Airlines or a Naval Flag Officer who is no longer allowed to fly.

  4. If the movie is about how stupidly they went for the F-18E instead of the F-14ST-21 or AST-21 them I’m all in. My heart races and aches of the thought of an F-14ST-21 with the biggest AESA radar on a fighter, integrated IR/targeting pod (like F-35-ish), JHMCS, Aim-120D’s, Aim-9X and maybe with a P&W F119 or F135 engine making the F-14 a performance beast! Like the F-35 its AESA would be considered a weapon in the EW realm and like the F-18E maybe they would also built a dedicated EW F-14..? But that’s all in the past and the F-18E is (rolls eyes) a very capable fighter.

  5. Solo is doing awful at theaters I hope Tom Cruise is paying attention if they are all in TG2. Some advice I can give is stay far away from politics, political correctness and catering to us self entitle millennials by making the movie hip hop-ish…. and don’t make it about how exceptional the F-18E is… I think we’re good.

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