Piece of Cake

Over the years I've been asked many times to describe what it's like to be a fighter pilot. And I've also been asked if air combat is really the way it looks in the movie Top Gun. I always remind folks that Top Gun was produced by Hollywood and was never meant to be a documentary. It's also worth noting that Top Gun was filmed in 1985 - before the dawn of today's mind blowing computer generated imagery (CGI). In fact, it was just the year before that a ground breaking film called The Last Starfighter was released in which, for the first time ever, significant portions of the film were animated exclusively using what were at the time cutting edge CGI sequences - even though that's not what they called it back then. As a closet computer geek I remember reading about the unimaginable computing power it took to create scenes for that movie. And today, Cartoon Network routinely produces episodes of Jimmy Neutron that make the CGI in The Last Starfighter look like it came out of the Crayola factory. So considering the technology available at the time, I'd say that Top Gun did about as good a job as possible in recreating air combat on film and still making a blockbuster movie in the process - and most of the fighter jocks I know would agree. Of course, the movie did not depict real fighter pilots - just a bunch of sailors dressed up like fighter pilots.

If you really want to get an understanding of fighter combat, I highly recommend the new History Channel series entitled Dogfights. It truly is the next best thing to being there. The digital recreations of the actual dogfights discussed are spot on. I've studied those famous aerial knife fights in the past. I've even talked to a few of the aces they interview in Dogfights. But while watching the show I still picked up a few pointers I missed the first time around.

But if you want to know what it is like to be in a fighter squadron - to know about fighter pilots themselves - there's really only one choice in video. Back in 1988 the BBC created a mini-series for Masterpiece Theater called Piece of Cake. The series chronicles the experiences of a Royal Air Force fighter squadron in the days leading up to the Battle of Britain. The characters in the script could have been lifted right out of the F-16 squadrons in my past. Piece of Cake does contain some rather glaring historical inaccuracies. For example, the squadron is flying Spitfires in the movie during a time frame when Hurricanes would have been in use. But if you will just suspend your disbelief you'll be rewarded with what are the best Spitfire and Messerschmidt flying sequences ever filmed. The quality of the DVD version of this film is disappointing. Even so, I recommend the DVD to anyone who is interested knowing what goes on behind the scenes in a fighter outfit.