 After 34 years, Top Gun is back and it's more intense than ever, thanks to a dedicated group of knock-a-dee and nav-air professionals. You'll see their efforts firsthand 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, it was heavy. I think the camera all weighed like 15-20 pounds. So we had to develop an enclosure that trashcanned it, aka fully enclosed it. 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 a pilot. Whatever actor was in there, they'd have 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 in 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 tightened 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 Cruise, 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 they had a hand in moviemaking 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? And of course, it kept her interest. 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 wore out of VHS tape. This movie was not possible without us.