Top Gun: The Navy's Fighter Weapons School (The Power Series) Review

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Top Gun: The Navy's Fighter Weapons School (The Power Series) ReviewCivilian photographer George Hall takes you on a guided tour of USN Fighter Weapons School (AKA "Top Gun"), the Navy's post-grad school for fighter pilots. In Top Gun, the top pilots from fighter squadrons thruought the fleet come, not to compete against each other as depicted in the movie, but to learn from each other and to bring their new found expertise back to their units. Rather than flying against each other (they do plenty of that while at sea) they spar against "agressor units" trained adversary pilots steeped in pseudo-communist bombast and flying old but mrderously agile and hard-to-spot jets like the A-4 Skywhak and the F-5 Tiger II. (The F-16N, though slated to equip agressor units hadn't begun to enter service by the time the book was published.) Victory against these agressors, despite the age of their aircraft, is impossible - at the outset. But Top Gun is also about education, and the agressors work their charges well, until the tide of battle begins to turn, and the students begin besting their teachers.
More than just a picture book about Top Gun, Hall tells the story of air combat in general - tracing its roots in the flimsy planes and low-tech tactics of WWI to the failure of our all-missile interceptors in the Vietnam war, and the return of modern fighter pilots to the simple section and dogfight tactics of WWII. Hall's pictures compliment the story - when telling of the F-14's disadvantes in terms of its mammoth size, he cuts to a shot of the plane flanked by much smaller Skyhawks, showing how the F-14's tailplane is wider than the Skyhawk's entire wingspan. Describing the simplicity of the F-5 Tiger, the author shows a picture of its control panel, an austere set-up which looks barely sophisticated enough to fly a twin-engine Beech, let alone a mach-2 fighter. When mentioning just how old the agressors' planes are (the Skyhawk was already old when flying missions in Vietnam) he shows one of the venerable jets surrounded by its support team and looking less like an operational jet than an entrant at a Warbirds show. Though not military trained - and making no bones about it - Hall goes a long way to putting the reader into the pilot's seat (actually the observer's seat, in Hall's case, but the g-forces are at least as powerful there). The digital sophistication of the F-18 is ably contrasted with the brutish resistance of such earlier jets as the Phantom. He also consistently underscores Top Gun's philosophy - never get caught with your guard down. (In the low-level exercises, F-14 drivers can expect to meet such threats as helicopter gunships and close-support planes like the A-10, machines with no chance against a mach-2 fighter, unless able to trick its pilot into fighting according to their rules). Through it all, he tosses out some great stories of air combat. I bought this book back in 1987, when the movie and its hype was till fresh, and read it cover-to-cover countless times. Today, the navy has changed - new planes and men; desert storm; political correctness; women flying combat aircraft; Top Gun has moved to remote Yuma, AZ from its probably more popular home in Miramar near San Diego; the MiG-29 and its generation of Russian jets was just becoming well known; the cold-war was still going on; and the Phantom - the plane that arguably started it all - is now a memory almost completely gone from Navy inventories. Yet Hall's book is still fresh today, both as a time capsule for what has changed, and a reminder for how much remains the same in the world of air combat.Top Gun: The Navy's Fighter Weapons School (The Power Series) Overview

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