 After 34 years, Top Gun is back and is more intense than ever thanks to a dedicated group of Naughty D and Nav-Air professionals. You'll see their efforts first-hand as actors take to the skies throughout the movie. All the visual that you see of it, the F-18, that is a live aircraft being filmed, no CGI in front of a screen. That is a true aircraft from the Top Gun School. The shots you see in the film are the direct result of a one-of-a-kind partnership between Paramount Pictures and the Navy. Paramount, in its filming of Top Gun 2, needed shots that were going to be more dramatic than Top Gun 1 and that required customization of the aircraft. Test engineers are used to putting cameras on Navy aircraft to evaluate updates and changes, but Top Gun Maverick producers had much different equipment and it needed to be mounted inside and outside of the F-18 Super Hornet. Being a Hollywood camera, about 8k visual, wasn't designed for being mounted to an F-18. For all the maneuvers, air loads, and G loads, and it was heavy. I think the camera all weighed like 15-20 pounds. So we had to develop an enclosure, that trash-candid, 8k, it was fully enclosed. We had to do a 500 mile an hour wind blast test. You know, if the pilot and actor were have to eject, you know, you had to withstand that wind blast so the camera system wouldn't fly back into an actor or pilot. Whatever actor was in there, they'd have, you know, multiple cameras focused on that cockpit of F-18 Super Hornet. It's not that big, it's not meant for a lot of extra equipment like that. So we had to get pretty creative and finding places to hide the equipment. Add to that, some strict deadline pressure. They'd say, hey, by this date here we need to be able to shoot this or we want to be able to start doing these things. And a lot of them were really tight timelines. Having some of these really tight timelines and interesting challenges really forced us to think critically and get creative and learn some lessons. On set, engineers made sure the Super Hornet stayed safe for cast and crew. Before every flight we would go in, make sure all equipment was typed down correctly, all the hardware was secured correctly, and then post-flight we'd do the same thing, make sure nothing shifted, nothing moved, everything was safe. I'll fully admit the first time that I was on set and Tom was going up in the backseat with these cameras installed, I mean, I was getting butterflies. I got to meet Tom Cruz, Miles Teller, some of the other cast, actually, you know, when we were out on the line setting up cameras before flights, they would come around with the pilot to do their walk around and they would just, you know, mention thanks for all your hard work, thanks for coming out, thanks for all what you do. When the movie hits theaters, the team says they're proud being at a hand in movie making history. I have a daughter, she rarely shows interest in my work, except for when I talked about the Top Gun movie, she said, oh, you're helping with that? No, so of course it keeps her interested. I'm a Top Gun fan from way back back in the 80s. I think I saw the movie four or five times in the theater and we're out of VHS tape. This movie was not possible without us.