F-18 Flights In Tom Cruise's New "Top Gun" Cost $11,374 An Hour
NDTV
Tom Cruise had insisted that all actors portraying pilots on the long-delayed "Top Gun: Maverick" film fly in one of the fighter jets built by Boeing Co.
The US Navy lent Tom Cruise F/A-18 Super Hornets for the new "Top Gun" movie. The only catches: The studio paid as much as $11,374 an hour to use the advanced fighter planes -- and Cruise couldn't touch the controls.
The "Mission Impossible" star, famous for performing his own stunts, insisted that all the actors portraying pilots on the long-delayed "Top Gun: Maverick" film fly in one of the fighter jets built by Boeing Co. so they could understand what it feels like to be a pilot operating under the strain of immense gravitational forces.
Cruise, 59, had also flown in a jet for the original "Top Gun," a smash hit in 1986.
Cruise ended up flying more than a dozen sorties for the new movie, but a Pentagon regulation bars non-military personnel from controlling a Defense Department asset other than small arms in training scenarios, according to Glen Roberts, the chief of the Pentagon's entertainment media office. Instead, the actors rode behind F/A-18 pilots after completing required training on how to eject from the plane in an emergency and how to survive at sea.
